Description: Advanced/Review Quotes:Claude Lalumi+res stories are dark, mordant, precisely formed. His first collection is extraordinarily accomplished in its craft and subversive intent. -Lucius ShepardThese stories are terrifically creepy. And not unlike Edgar Allan Poe or Potted Meat Product, they gave me the willies. -Christopher MooreThis finely crafted, stylishly dark collection is a vitrine of objets and curios, a specimen cabinet of elegant bizarrerie. I recommend it to all connoisseurs of lyricism and things passing strange. -Richard CalderYou hear about kids locked away in attics, their only toys broken clothespins, a few pipe cleaners, a spool of yarn. Yet with these toys, they manage to concoct imaginary worlds of great wonder and beauty. Claude must have grown up in an attic because he writes like one of those kids. -Neil SmithClaude Lalumi+re's extravagant imagination is matched by only two other qualities: his compassion for his characters, and his sparkling facility with language. -Paul Di FilippoDisturbing and funny, sexy and psychedelic, this collection marks the debut of a highly original voice in fantastic fiction. -Jan Lars JensenClaude Lalumi+re's stories are delicious. -Anna Tambour +++Objects of Worship Claude Lalumi+re. ChiZine (LPG of Canada, dist.), $18.95 paper (276p) ISBN 978-0-9812978-2-8The strange is matter-of-factly mundane in Canadian author and editor Lalumi+re's collection of 10 reprinted and two original stories of the surreal and fantastic. Deities and spiritual grace are both unfathomably alien and somehow less than you might expect when Lucifer makes a deal with the phone company (A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens) and likewise in the title story, where keeping your gods satisfied is like caring for extra-finicky but disturbingly powerful cats. Lalumire's love of comic book heroes informs the antics of Hochelaga and Sons, Spiderkid and Destroyer of Worlds, and the daily lives of zombies set the stage for the blackly comedic The Ethical Treatment of Meat and A Visit to the Optometrist. Even when the plots aren't quite enough to carry Lalumi+re's curious ideas, they're still intensely memorable. (Nov.)-Publisher's Weekly (September 21, 2009) +++Objects of Worship Claude Lalumi+re ChiZine Publications 280 pp $18.95Objects of Worship, author Claude Lalumi+res first collection of short stories featuring elements of the fantastic, is an odd duckling.As much as one may argue that the bulk of these stories are merely genre-driven, the nuanced mood and sparse word choice the author uses suggest way more than just monsters in the night or spaceship battles that take place on far-away planets.Lalumi+res trick is to make the fantastic appear mundane (such as the gay zombie couple who adopt a wayward living boy in The Ethical Treatment of Meat) and then to amplify what one may consider mundane to fantastical proportions. The author manages to push away some of the more classical, space opera elements of science fiction in order to focus on the issue at hand, be it adoption or the intensely private nature of relationships.The best science fiction, I think, is about transgression, explained Lalumi+re. And for me, thats what all art should be like. Theres a status quo and it needs to be questioned. Good or bad, thats not the issue. The issue is that we keep having to ask ourselves questions.To me, what science fiction and fantasy can do way better than any other kind of fiction is push those boundaries, said Lalumi+re. You can postulate some scenarios that will extrapolate upon one aspect of whats happening in society and just really push that to its logical extreme and see what the consequences are.The characters Lalumi+re creates run the gam

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