Title: The Magical Mimics in Oz
Author: Jack Snow
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 234
Rating: 4/5
The introduction to this one says that it’s one of the darker books in the Oz canon, but I’m not sure I’d necessarily agree with that. Even in the first one, there was a field of opium poppies and our main characters were basically overwhelmed by heroin.
Still, the plot here is certainly dark enough, with the titular magical mimics taking over Oz by essentially acting as doppelgangers or polymorphs. They can take on people’s appearance by standing in their shadows, and when that happens, their victims are also frozen into place.
It could almost be the plot of a horror novel, but in this case, the story takes place with a healthy doze of Oz whimsy. It’s actually one of the better stories in the series, and that’s saying a lot given that by this point, we’ve got through nearly forty of them.
My edition was a retrofit edition by an independent publisher that had taken the public domain text of the story and republished it. They’d added a little story of their own too, and while the story in the last edition of theirs that I read, I quite liked this one. It read as true to the original canon and felt like it belonged there.