Heads Will Roll by Lish McBride
My rating: 3/5 cats
badass cage fighting unicorn?? don’t mind if i do.
so this one takes place in the same world as Hold Me Closer, Necromancer, but like The Too-Clever Fox, and UNLIKE A Visit to the House on Terminal Hill: A Tor.Com Original, it will still make sense to the uninitiated. like me. I KNOW, I KNOW i should read them—so many of you love that series, but i haven’t taken the plunge. yet. but i will.
for now—i just have this story, which is about lena and her unicorn-pal steve. do NOT make fun of steve’s name. steve is a bad mother (shut your mouth)
and steve is going to be participating in a most dangerous game—a battle against some other cryptozoological creature in a magically-fenced area with very few rules as an entertainment for wealthy bettors. but don’t be afeared for steve because 1) it is not necessarily a fight to the death and 2) steve is going by the name “phantom” right now, and he’s got his own reasons for being there. as does lena, who has hidden depths herself.
i enjoyed this one very much—it’s got unexpectedly humorous parts, all-too-brief monster battles, i enjoyed the premise and i really would have liked to have spent more time with these characters on their cage fighting circuit.
here are the many creatures mentioned in this story in one way or another so you can play an imaginary match ’em up game where you dish about who you think would prevail in a fight. starred creatures are those which have appeared in monsterporns i have read.
unicorn*:
yowie*:
nemean lion:
hydra*:
harpy:
manticore:
minotaur*:
wepwawet:
waheela:
centaur*:
(NOT
)
chimera:
hellhounds:
chupacabra*:
definitely one of the good ones in this free tor short project—i wish there was more of it, but that in itself is always a good sign. and twss.
get on this here bandwagon!
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/stories/2012/11/he…
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