Alas – and it’s no fun having to write this – I was sorely disappointed.

That first story, ‘The Trophy Room’, starts with Peter Cosford telling Leo Harper, a psychiatrist, how he discovered that his best friend could turn into a crocodile with the contents of some mysterious bottles. Harper is sceptical – until Cosford gives him one of the bottles, and the psychiatrist manages to transform his cat into a dragon, which then goes on the rampage around Swindon. There’s a certain distance to the telling of the latter: we hear about what the dragon does, rather than experiencing it, as we perhaps should. Still, never mind, I thought: ‘The Trophy Room’ may feel a bit like a shaggy dog story, but the punchline raises a smile, so it does the job. And it’s only one story, after all.

Unfortunately, I also had misgivings about several other stories; and similar problems tended to crop up. Some lines of dialogue just sound odd, like this, spoken by a thief in ‘The Indian Rope Trick’: ‘“When you are up there grab that last pile of bonds I left on the main desk by mistake. I thought they were worthless but apparently that isn’t so.”’ The characterization is also a bit sketchy, insofar as it feels as though some characters could be swapped between stories and it wouldn’t make much difference. But, given that the tales in ‘Moondust’ do not seem to be intended as character studies, perhaps this doesn’t matter too much.

Gibson structures most of the stories here around a single impossible element, whether it’s a man turning into a dragon, or a demonstration of time travel, or what-have-you. It’s how the author handles the fantasy elements which is key to the success (or otherwise) of those pieces. Quite often, a story will end just as we learn that the fantastic element is real. The trouble with this approach is that there’s no way to use or develop the fantasy; it places all the emphasis on the ‘reveal’. And, sadly, it’s often unsatisfying: sometimes there’s too little atmosphere; sometimes the fantasy is not original enough, or the reasons behind it are unclear (as with the murderous corn dollies of ‘Dragon’s Needles’). This leaves the stories with nowhere to go.

Many of the tales in ‘Moondust’ are set in Gibson’s home-town of Faringdon in Oxfordshire and the surrounding area, and many feature dragons – as well they might, since, legend has it, St George slew the dragon at the nearby Dragon Hill. Some characters also recur, most notably Jarge Benson (who appears to be a paranormal investigator of some kind: it’s never made clear), who appears in four stories. These common features need not be a bad thing necessarily – with Oxford, Swindon and the rural Thames Valley, there’s a range of contrasting environments in which to build up a coherent world with myths layered on top of myths, and magic and mystery around every corner… But that sense of magic isn’t here, and the recurring features feel repetitive rather than united.

So far, I’ve not been very positive about ‘Moondust’; but there are some good entries here. ‘Silver Wolf’ is the most successful of the ‘transformation’ stories, thanks to some nicely atmospheric writing. ‘Only the Best’ is the only non-fantastic piece in the book, an effective (and affecting) portrait of a Colombian secret agent working undercover. But top of the pile for me is ‘Remains’, in which aliens kidnap Roman soldiers from Hadrian’s Wall and return them to Earth in the present day. Reading it, one wonders what ‘Moondust’ would have been like if Gibson had let his imagination take flight a little more.

There’s one final twist to this tale. Cleve Gibson has a number of stories available online, including two on this very site which don’t appear in ‘Moondust’. I looked at them after reading the book. And I like them. I think they’re better than most of the tales in ‘Moondust’. But it’s the tales in ‘Moondust’ that I’m reviewing and, whilst I’m in no doubt that Cleve Gibson has talent, I’m disappointed not to have seen more of it on display in this collection.

David Hebblethwaite lives out in the wilds of Yorkshire, where he attempts to make a dent in his collection of unread books. You can read more of David's reviews at his review blog.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.