About.com Rating

This short story is set in the same world as Laura Lam's Micah Grey series, but has Drystan the White Clown as the main character. The same fantastic world building and slightly creepy (but also wonderful) circus setting is also present. Unlike many between-novel stories that series authors use to keep fans happy while they wait for the next full-length tale, "The Snake Charm" stands on its own as a complete story, but it also fills in some backstory for fans.

Publication Information

• Full Title: "The Snake Charm"
• Series: Vestigial Tales (#1) (related to the Micah Grey series)
• Author: Laura Lam
• Publisher: Penglass Publishing
• Publication Date: 2014
• ISBN: 978-0-9929428-0-9 (Kindle), 978-0-9929428-1-6 (ebook)

Snakes

Something is amiss in R.H. Ragona's circus. Ringmaster Bil is drinking more heavily than ever, and everyone knows he hits his wife, though she always says she had an accident. One evening after the performance, one of the clowns gathers his closest accomplices--the White Clown, Drystan, among them--and proposes they stage a mutiny. The ringmaster has a dangerous object in his possession, and the clowns want to save the circus from Bil before it's too late and they all lose their jobs.

But then Bil Ragona also approaches Drystan, and asks for his help. Drystan is uneasy, but once he learns exactly what the dangerous object is that Bil owns, and that has been stolen by the head clown, he knowns he can't walk away.

Charming

I didn't even need to think about buying this ebook-only short story by Laura Lam; she could have charged twice the price and I'd still have gladly paid because I absolutely love the world and characters she created in Pantomime (read my review) and Shadowplay (read my review).

I wouldn't even have cared if it consisted of nothing but filler material or chapters edited out of one of the novels.

I'm happy to report, though, that "The Snake Charm" is not filler at all. Instead, it's a fully-realized short story set sometime before Pantomime, with series secondary character Drystan as protagonist and R.H. Ragona's circus as the setting. While the description is necessarily brief, there is enough that even a reader who has not yet set foot in Lam's world (or read her novels, if you prefer) can enjoy it. In other words, "The Snake Charm" can easily stand alone as a story, but it's such a tempting morsel I hope readers will want to go on and read the books if they haven't already done so.

Alas

There is a melancholy aspect to my adoration of Lam's writing, though. As I write this (June 2014), I only recently learned that the publisher of her novels, Strange Chemistry, is shutting down with very little notice. It seems the YA market is saturated and they just can't compete. I'm heartbroken for more than one reason, as they published many of my favorite books this year and last (like Katya's World and Zenn Scarlett), and I had also submitted one of my own manuscripts to them. At least their parent press, Angry Robot, will continue on.

This means that the future of the main Micah Grey series is unknown, but hopefully Lam will either find another publisher, or self-publish her novels as she did this short story. I just hope she gets her books out there somehow, because I'll be ready to buy them all as soon as I can get my hands on them.