A rather naughty book cover...

Is it wrong for me to like this cover as much as I do? Yes, I know that it's objectifying the girl in the picture, but something about the way in which she's looking back at us over her shoulder with a little half smile cuts against that somewhat. Whilst the story which the cover explicitly illustrates, 'Love, Your Magic Spell is Everywhere' is hardly free from such issues, it's conclusion does at least undercut some of the narrator's assumptions. The girl with the most attractive figure is, predictably perhaps, the one who cares least about her appearance, and who finally catches him with a geniune love potion to match his X-Ray Specs.

Really, whatever issues I might have with the gender relations present in Finney's stories, they seem so much of the time in which they were written, as to feel almost harmless. Boyish, really. And the most problematic story in this respect, 'The Coin Collector', contains something which is certainly relevant to my suposedly more enlightened self, with it's narrator whose wife complains that he enjoys reading rather too much. Redolent of a nostalgia that I recognise from Ray Bradbury as well as from the author of Time and Again, Finney finds a number of variations on the idea of travelling through time, with the 1880s appearing most frequently as the Eden that his characters most long for. Other stories feature a prisoner on death row managing to free himself through the magic of painting an opening door on his cell wall ('Prison Legend'), or a mysterious balloon ride through night time San Francisco which unleashes something hidden within the two protagonists ('The Intrepid Aeronaut'). The most moving story is probably the last, 'The Love Letter', in which lovers communicate across time through letters, but are never able to meet until the modern New Yorker finds the grave of the women from 1882 he fell in love with through a few letters.

I remember that day and all those long ago, deep-summer days in Galesburg, Illinois, with a terrible nostalgia. Already the sky was a hard hot blue, the air shimmering with sun. The grass under our bare feet was faded and dry and the tree locusts were sawing their wings for yards and blocks and miles around us.

'A Possible Candidate for the Presidency'