Sometimes the most disturbing, and most intriguing, stories in the speculative genres are those that take place in seemingly natural circumstances, The streets the characters walk down are nearly identical to the streets you and I walk along on our daily routine. Even most of the things that happen to them are unremarkable as they live out their mundane existence. When something just slightly out of the ordinary is introduced into this environment, it naturally stands out in stark relief to its surroundings.

For audiences raised on the non-stop action of adventure-based fantasy and science fiction, the intellectual and psychological intricacies of works by people like Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges or Britain's J. G. Ballard might seem boring and have little or nothing in common with what they are used to reading. Yet if a reader is willing to persevere, and acclimatize themselves to the slower pace, they will find the rewards from this type of work far outweigh the perceived action. For the action doesn't happen where we are used to seeing it, as the majority of it happens inside the heads of the protagonists instead of in a battlefield or the deck of a space cruiser.

One of the past masters of this style of writing is Zoran Zivkovic, and his recently published novella Seven Touches Of Music, available in the United States through AIO Publishers, offers further proof of just how good he is. In it he introduces elements of the bizarre into the mundane with eerie and thought provoking results.

Music has been thought to be able to work various forms of magic on listeners with its power to inspire powerful emotions, or comfort a troubled heart. Expectant mothers play music to their unborn children in the hopes of influencing their development, and hospitals will play music to coma patients in the hopes that it will provide them comfort on some level, and perhaps even trigger a reaction in the deeper levels of the unconscious mind. In Seven Touches Of Music Zivkovic takes this premise and examines the reactions that of seven people touched by music.

An autistic child hearing a piece of music during an art class mysteriously breaks the pattern of drawing circles that he has been following for months by writing out a sequence of numbers. When the doctor working with him asks a mathematician friend if there is any significance to them, he is told that they are "...one of the fundamental values of nature, the fine-structure constant..." Some how or other a six year old autistic child has written out the decimal that defines life while listening to Chopin. Even more odd, is that no matter how many times the doctor repeats the experiment, the child never deviates from his set pattern again.