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Dragon Season is the 1991 Michael Cassutt contemporary fantasy that should be on more readers' shelves than it is. The protagonist Ed Edwards is a Hollywood TV writer working on a horror anthology series when his estranged sister disappears under circumstances that turn out to involve a portal to another world that opens periodically in his hometown. The book follows Ed as he tries to find her, and what he learns about both worlds in the process.
Cassutt's strength in Dragon Season is the careful texture of the Hollywood writing-room material and the small-town material in equal measure. The TV-production scenes have the kind of insider attention only a working screenwriter can produce. Fans of Tim Powers's Last Call or Charles de Lint's Newford sequence will recognize the careful weave of the contemporary realist and the secondary-world fantasy registers.
The portal world is genuinely strange. Cassutt commits to its physical and social details rather than treating it as a generic high-fantasy backdrop. The closing chapters earn their emotional weight.
Four stars. A small underread fantasy debut that holds up. Readers who enjoyed Charles de Lint's Moonheart or Tim Powers's Declare will find Dragon Season Michael Cassutt the right kind of careful contemporary fantasy. Recommended even for readers who do not normally seek out the form.
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