Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.
Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”
The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth, The Book of Ruth; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; Ursa Minor (all reviewed earlier); The Gentleman (not reviewed in my blogs); and You Little Demon (reviewed here).
It is a little known fact that, once every thousand years, a demon (living in Hell) gets a chance to visit the Earth. He has to return unless he can convince a human being to switch places with him. Then the demon gets to live on the good green Earth. The down side is that he becomes mortal. In this story, a demon almost gets to stay on the Earth, even though living in the country with a frumpy old wife, just before he dies of a heart attack.
There is a long literature of mortals visiting Hell, from Dante all the way to the recent bestseller Katabasis by R. F. Kuang. It is refreshing to see the plot go the other way.
Like Rice’s other books, this one gets me to ask questions that I did not know I wanted to ask. And it this story is very short, written with irrepressible humor.
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