Piper at the Gates of Dawn

With a title like that, Rosemary Edghill’s influences are fairly clear. Edghill started out as a comic writer (so she can safely claim she killed vampires for a living!) and went through several jobs before becoming a full time writer.
She’s a genre gipsy (has written in every genre except westerns) and has been associated with the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey – so Edghill comes with quite a resume.
Paying the Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a collection of her short fiction. In her introduction, she tells the story of a rejection on which had been typed “find another hobby”. While that judgment was unnecessarily harsh, it’s not hard to see why some readers would be put off – Edghill’s prose is very wordy and sometimes hard to navigate.
For my money, the best story in the book is The Maltese Feline. Here Edghill cheerfully mixes her genres, crossing hard boiled detective fiction with Arthurian fantasy. Amazingly, she pulls it off, and the result is thoroughly entertaining.
I also enjoyed A Gift of Two Grey Horses, a lovely little Norse fable, and Prince of Exiles, originally published in Out of Avalon.
But I am still struggling to get started with The Sword of the North, where Edghill’s wordiness is out of control. So here is a book that I found to be like the Curate’s Egg – very good in parts – or perhaps even more like the little girl with a curl – when it is good, it is very, very good, but when it is bad, the prose bogs you down like lead boots.
I am a newcomer to Edghill’s work, though, and none of that has put me off reading her again. In all, I’m glad she didn’t find another hobby.

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