Sean F. Lynch's "The Cave"

The March/April issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction arrived last week, and I've finally been able to take a gasp of fiction amidst this sea of critical theory that I've been reading. I really enjoyed Sean F. Lynch's story "The Cave." This man knows how to write about family, and about the fluidity of time, and about the bonds that form between generations of kin. I really like the dialogue in this story, and the setting was positively claustrophobic. In the foreword notes, the author describes a trip he took with his sons that formed the story's genesis. It's this type of genuine reflection on life and the passage of time that gives speculative fiction so much gravitas, because introducing a fantastic element (best manifested here in the setting) provides an artistic license to really drill down on the core of what it means to be a father, and to pass along whatever collected wisdom and guidance one can to his children.

I rarely see that so artfully done in the middle-aged ennui tales of a Bosch or a Cheever (though those stories have their charm as well; it's just of a different sort) story...

(P.S. So how long has the word "dialogue" been getting flagged in spell checkers? Sheesh, blogger. Get it together!)