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Realms of Fantasy, edited by Shawna McCarthy, June 2005, $3.99, www.rofmagazine.com, 82 pages, bi-monthly full-size
"The Storyteller's Wife," by Eugie Foster, is a new take on a very old concept: people being stolen by the creatures of Faerie. In this case, it's Janie Harper's husband who, rather than killing himself as originally thought, was stolen and replaced by a lifeless duplicate. Janie, unwilling to let her husband go so easily, has to use all of her guile, as well as the tricks learned from years spent listening to her husband's fanciful fairy tales, to find her way to Faerie. There, however, she'll have to make a truly hard decision, one affecting not just her and her husband, but all of Faerie. What choice can she make that will end up benefitting everyone involved? This is a lovely story, as beautifully-told as it is classic; strip out the most modern elements, and you have something that could have been told a hundred years ago just as easily.
Also touching on the theme of family and lost love, Jim C. Hines's "Deliverance" has...