This Week's Oz Short Story

Oh, my, the stories in I Should Have Stayed in Oz just keep getting better and better! "Who Rode the Winds" by Bradley H. Sinor and his wife, Susan Sinor, is a wonderful little gem of a story. Dorothy is now grown up and making her living as a petty thief (!). She and her partner, Nathan, receive an interesting commission to break into the safe of a M. Jay Gatsby of East Egg, New York, where Dorothy finds one of her silver shoes. Then they're caught by the Great Gatsby. This is just the start of an adventure that takes Dorothy and Nathan to Omaha to meet the Wizard, and then Hollywood. It turns out there is a secret society to protect the existence of Oz from getting out, and now that she's old enough to understand the truth, Dorothy is being let into the group. That nosy reporter who first let the secret out, L. Frank Baum, is now dead, but his son has teamed up with a Capt. Hugh Fitzgerald (!!) to exploit the elder Baum's collection of Oz artifacts, so Dorothy must stop them. This was a lot of fun, and the crossover with The Great Gatsby is a terrific idea. (There's also mention of a young archaeology student named Jones, hinting at even more possible connections.) And while other stories in this collection make allusions to the book(s), this one makes all kinds of accurate references to Baum's life and the early exploitation of the Oz brand! My biggest gripe is that, like so many other stories in this collection, it ends just as things are getting good and Dorothy gets back to Oz! Come on, Yard Dog Press, I want to see a volume of sequels to some of these!