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Plot, to my tastes, is a necessary evil as best. Structure required to hold the damn thing together, bones to hang the meat from, but I can’t say I ever enjoyed a story solely for the plot. I’ve ...

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The scientist’s healthy-but-radically-altered form as a female sasquatch turned out seven-feet four-inches tall. Taller than Frank but not so much it underlined his own relative shortness too muc...

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After the burst of magic the scientist had been trained through a decade of college to disregard, the first thing he felt was all the things he didn’t feel. He didn’t feel weak, didn’t feel tremb...

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The peril of a city with endless shine, sunrise to sunset three-sixty-five, is the way the brightest lights also cast the darkest shadows. The deep azures of sky and sea, that white-hot beating y...

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There was a bright flash of light, well, light and not-light, really. The realm of the lower angels is seen partially in the ultra-violet, according to Mitzi via Frank’s second-hand recollections...

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The golem, the sasquatch, Frankenstein’s doctor, all these impossible monsters that should not exist, the washed-up jock and the rock stars past twenty-seven, the self-pitying failure, the holy w...

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But you must also understand why the scientist was doing what he was doing. Taking a creature that wasn’t supposed to exist and yet existed, a creature that believed himself the last of his kind,...

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Once upon a time, Bubbe Sara told Mitzi, as that’s how stories are done, there was a city called Prague. There’s still a Prague, not so different from how it is now but so long ago, nonetheless. ...

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The Amazing Mitzi’s hesitancy to use kabbalistic practice in flashy ways, in obvious fashions, in manners that might hold her to covenants she hadn’t the capacity to keep, was not a new thing in ...

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Using a bus inside Los Angeles as a means of transportation is about as efficacious as putting a note inside a bottle then hurling it into the Pacific Ocean is in terms of means of communication....

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“I healed,” Frank turned his right arm out toward me, parting through thick fur to show the marks that remained from the scientist’s rushed intravenous-port installation, pink skin underneath, kn...

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If you give all the secrets away, there’s no trick. No one shows for the next engagement, no one pays to see it. Even if they can’t work it themselves, they know how it was done and convince them...

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The problem with telling long-form stories is, to tell them well, they have to end. It’s easy to fall in love with characters, places and things, easy to want to know what happens on and on forev...

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There was blood, because of course there was, the scientist was attempting a transfusion from Frank straight into his own veins. There was the shock-non-shock that sasquatch blood looks exactly t...

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Once, there was a man whose world fell apart around him. Not knowing what to do with himself, he did as so many do, he went west, the direction of change. Good changes, bad changes, change either...

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Magic is not a trick, she told him, it is a promise. It isn’t about fooling someone else or fudging reality, it’s a pact that is made. “Both stage magic and actual magic,” she continued, “though ...

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“I’ve been wondering something,” I said as I swirled at my coffee’s dregs, “something kind of tangential to your story.” “Sure,” Frank said, “like I said, I’ve got all night.” “You’ve lived a ver...

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I mean, I’m hardly the first person to notice something fundamentally uncanny at the intersection of Sunset and Gower, the Gower Gulch strip mall or Denny’s there. To the spot where the actual ra...

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“So, if Mitzi was attracted to you but you’re not attracted to humans, why didn’t she ever, uh,” I tried to be delicate but some things can’t be put delicately, “fix that with her magics.” “What ...

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“You can’t argue a thing into being,” she said, “that’s not how magic works.” You can conjure a little through work and practice, you can gamble or bargain or negotiate with the higher or even th...

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One of the other upsides of Los Angeles, for all the bad things you can say about it, is the utter timelessness of living there. You can’t account for seasons in the way you can in other parts of...

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Not everything is awful about Los Angeles, I’m not saying that. I don’t want to say that. It’s just that every joy there has a dark side, the kind of deep shadows that can only be cast in the bla...

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There are few phrases with a stronger one-two of power and malleability in our English than “the end of the world”. It means so damned much to so many but also a different thing to nearly every p...

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“I hate those The Secret books,” she told Frank more than once, “the idea that magic’s simple as projecting intentions then getting whatever you want, such a childish and hungry and greedy way of...

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“You play any instruments?” Frank asked, deflecting back to me. “My brother,” I said, “brilliant guitarist, though he’s rusty. My dad is, was,” Frank and I both stumble on the line between what i...

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