Mystery Hill: 01/14/08

The final story in the January issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine is a light-hearted science fiction piece by Alex Irvine called "Mystery Hill." While it was a relatively easy story to read, it wasn't one of my favorites from the issue.

Mystery Hill is your typical mystery spot where water runs up hill and whatnot. The owner of Mystery Hill is Ken Kassarjian. He's been constantly debunked in his thirty-three year tenure and sometimes called a lizard-man. It isn't until a physicist starts to take readings on the fluctuating gravity at Mystery Hill that things get interesting.

It basically comes down to everything that the crackpots have been saying is true and all of this being tied to string theory. Against this is the romance between the proprietor and the physicist but there just isn't enough chemistry between them to keep it interesting. Likewise the revelation of the truth behind the lizard-men doesn't bring the story to a satisfying ending. Things just sort of draw to a close. Irvine seems hesitant to be as silly as he needs to be to tell a broad parody of science fiction. It would have been better if it had sillier.

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