2026 read #10: In Lands That Never Were, edited by Gordon Van Gelder.

In Lands That Never Were: Tales of Swords and Sorcery from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Gordon Van Gelder

395 pages

Published 2004

Read from February 15 to February 22

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Much like Colin Meloy’s Wildwood, I repeatedly checked this book out of the library in the early years of this blog, but never actually read it. It’s an anthology of sword & sorcery tales first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Back in those days, when I still had an unreasonably starstruck idea of the magazine, that seemed like an irresistible intersection of my interests.

Why didn’t I read it back then? Well, Van Gelder’s slapdash introduction, which doesn’t have much to say and isn’t properly formatted for printing (utilizing hyphens in place of em dashes, for instance), didn’t help lure me in. And the book’s formatting—12 point Times New Roman, copy-and-pasted without regard for the finer details of typesetting—was weirdly off-putting. Which is a shame; my first real introduction to sword & sorcery came instead from Lin Carter’s Year’s Best anthologies, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

I want to make a point in the coming months of reading as much S&S, classic and new. (I have my reasons.) So now’s a good time to push through and finally check this one off.

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“The Hall of the Dead” by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp (1967). I have longstanding issues with Howard, but at least the dude knew how to create impeccable atmosphere. This imitation, built by de Camp from Howard’s brief outline, is fine, but lacks the gallop and fire of classic Conan. It feels plotted by rote, checking off boxes, a product rather than a story. That said, I do enjoy a giant slug patrolling a cursed, ruined city, and that’s just the prelude to a fun dungeon crawl. C

“A Hedge Against Alchemy” by John Morressy (1981). First of the Kedrigern stories, which I’ve never particularly cared for. “Fantasy cliches, but played for laughs” is iffy terrain for me, and this one is no different. I suppose this first run feels a tiny bit fresher than Morressey’s subsequent iterations on the same theme. C-?

“Ill-Met in Lankhmar” by Fritz Leiber (1970). My first exposure to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser was “Scylla’s Daughter” (read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Fantasy). I found it corny but entertaining. Each subsequent encounter with them has led to diminishing returns. This entry is no exception. The tale of how the twain first met already feels like the leering self-parody that defines their stories from the 1970s. It isn’t as bad as, say, “Under the Thumbs of the Gods” (read and reviewed in The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 2), but it reinforces my general disinterest in further Fafhrd and Grey Mouser outings. And it’s inordinately long. D-?

“Counting the Shapes” by Yoon Ha Lee (2001). It’s strange how Yoon Ha Lee’s early career trajectory matches what I once hoped for my own. Three years older than me, Lee got his first story published in F&SF in 1999, the same year I got my first personalized rejection from Van Gelder. If only I’d been able to study more short fiction and apply myself to my writing, I could have been Lee’s close contemporary, instead of still struggling to make inroads against the current state of the market. Ah well. The point is, I should read more of Lee’s writing. This one is a particularly good start, weaving poetry, magic, and math into remorseless, heartbreaking logic. I would almost call this epic fantasy instead of Sword & Sorcery, flush as it is with politics and worldbuilding deepened with subtle details. A-

“Firebird” by R. Garcia y Robertson (2001). Long ago, my first exposure to Garcia y Robertson was the novel / fixup version of Firebird. Not familiar with his, ah, idiom, I was intrigued by its Eastern European setting: novel to me then, still somewhat rare in fantasy to this day. I even liked it for the first half or so. But Garcia y Robertson is who he is, which is a relentlessly horny straight guy who never stops asking, “Why don’t we have naively naked virgins in sci-fi anymore?” (and is adamant that lesbian sex doesn’t count against virginity). I have not been looking forward to this revisit. Fortunately, this novella is the strongest part of Firebird, rich with natural and cultural detail, and only somewhat leering. Plus, there’s a witch who lives in a hut made of mammoth bones, which will always win points from me. B-

“Dragon’s Gate” by Pat Murphy (2003). This story exudes atmosphere, expertly interweaving a tremendous sense of place with an analysis of how men use their power to control and take advantage of women. Outstanding. A-

“After the Gaud Chrysalis” by Charles Coleman Finlay (2004). This is my first time reading a story from Finlay, who would, of course, go on to succeed Van Gelder as F&SF’s editor, sending me encouraging rejections when I finally got back into submitting in the mid-2010s. I’m intrigued by the idea of what Finlay called “New Pulp,” and I like the depth of worldbuilding here, which crams a trilogy’s worth of factions and backstory into one novella. The dialogue, though, is too YA-adjacent for my tastes, packed with enough quips and nods and shrugs to make a 2010s-YA-boom fan feel right at home. And if I’m being honest, that very density of worldbuilding can make the pacing feel choppy at times. Still, all in all it’s a solid adventure, and the first story here I’d unhesitatingly label sword & sorcery since “Lankhmar.” B-

 

“The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death” by Ellen Kushner (1991). Even though it’s been years and years since I last read one of Kushner’s Riverside books, this story was like returning to a warm, familiar second home. The story itself is scarcely an anecdote, and it has absolutely no business being in a sword & sorcery collection. (A secondary world fantasy centering swords is not automatically S&S.) But I enjoyed it. B

“The Island in the Lake” by Phyllis Eisenstein (1998). I keep meaning to read more of Eisenstein’s Alaric stories. The first I ever read was 1977’s “The Land of Sorrow” (read and reviewed here); the most recent was 2019’s “The City of Lost Desire” (here). This one falls right in the middle of that extensive span. Like Alaric himself, Eisenstein’s stories are gentle, soft-spoken, and full of heart. This one (while once again having nothing to do with sword & sorcery; it’s courtly low fantasy with an implication of Pern-style space colonization) is charming, start to finish. A-

“Darkrose and Diamond” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1999). We return to Earthsea for a typically Le Guinian tale: sensitive, empathetic, emotionally deft, beautifully written, and emphatically not sword & sorcery. I loved it, of course. A-

“King Rainjoy’s Tears” by Chris Willrich (2002). Potentially fascinating spin on the “two rogues” template: Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone go through a series of encounters in order to kidnap three beings made from the tears of a king. The story has a solid opening, but the narrative tends toward the scattershot, and too much of its emotional background relies on having read the previous Persimmon and Imago story, which I have not. Still, it’s closer to sword & sorcery than most of the stories in this book. C+

“The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant” by Jeffrey Ford (2000). Turn of the millennium metafiction satirizing the excesses of 1970s grognard fantasy (or, rather, the cultural impression that 1970s grognard fantasy left on wider culture). The story grew from an unpromising beginning; Jeffrey Ford is a sure hand. But humorous fantasy will never be my favorite. C+

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Some excellent stories I’m happy to have finally read, mixed with some disappointments. And a whole lot of tales that had nothing to do with sword & sorcery as I understand it. Expanding the subgenre is fine; watering down the definition to include something like “Darkrose and Diamond” renders the term meaningless.

2026 read #9: Allosaurus in Wonderland by Jennifer Lee Rossman.

Allosaurus in Wonderland and Other Tales of Avalonia by Jennifer Lee Rossman

151 pages

Published 2025

Read from February 13 to February 15

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I’ve been so excited to read this collection. I preordered it months ago, and have had my copy since November. But as so often happens with ADHD, I’ve had it all this time and just haven’t cracked it open until now.

Rossman is our finest contemporary author of dinosaur short fiction. (Michael Swanwick would be in the same conversation, except I don’t think he’s published any dinosaur stories in the last two decades.) I may be a little bit biased; after all, I put together the Mesozoic Reader anthology, and Rossman’s “Don’t Cry for Me Argentinosaurus” is one of my favorite stories from that book. Likewise, their “Joan of Archaeopteryx” is one of the only worthwhile entries of the otherwise disposable Apex: World of Dinosaurs anthology. Even if the stories are humorous, Rossman takes storytelling seriously, somehow turning punning titles and pop culture references into affecting, empowering fiction.

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“Allosaurus in Wonderland” is as delightful an Alice pastiche as the title suggests, though it’s brief, mostly serving to introduce Avalonia, a realm where all periods of history and prehistory have mishmashed together thanks to random creatures (and little girls) who came stumbling through wormholes. There isn’t much to the story, but I enjoyed it.

“Baryonyx and Clyde” is the brilliant combination of dinosaurs and 1930s crime pulp that Katharine Metcalf Roof’s “A Million Years After” (reviewed here) teased but didn’t deliver. It even centers on purloining a dinosaur egg. Lindy and Campbell are time crooks, taking advantage of the Avalonian portals to loot old shops for antiques to sell in the future. I can’t say more without spoiling it, but I fucking loved this story.

“The Good, the Bad, and the Utahraptor” (original version published 2018) is the tale of Rosita, who longs to escape her dying little town and make it in a Wild West show. Her plan? Tame and ride one of the big raptors that have been killing cattle and depopulating Hell Creek. The story ends before achieving the emotional resonance of “Baryonyx,” but it was enjoyable nonetheless.

“A Tale of Two Citipati” extends Rosita’s story into the founding and naming of Avalonia, as misfits from Hell Creek cross over and meet, by chance, modern Ren Faire goers who hopped into a shimmery portal and got stuck. This is less of a standalone story than it is exposition for the setting as a whole, looping Lindy and Campbell back into the mix along with Rosita and Marcus from the Ren Faire, and setting in motion a generations-long conflict.

“Pirates of the Cambrian” sees Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan stranded on the wrong side of a wormhole, where they meet Anne Bonny and her pirate crew. With that setup, I had high expectations for this piece, but the brevity of all these stories works against it. I assume it’s here to set up later appearances from Earhart and Bonny.

“A Connecticut Yangchuanosaurus in King Arthur’s Court” likewise sees D.B. Cooper plummet through a wormhole in order to set up his presence in Camelops, medieval LARP kingdom and repressive regime. While I prefer more standalone stories, I suppose there’s nothing wrong with moving pieces into place.

Allosaurus is turning out to be something of a short novel told in vignettes rather than a conventional collection.

“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spinosaurus” introduces us to Enid, former knight of Camelops, who agrees to defect to New Hell Creek in hopes of someday liberating her home from its repression. The first half was quite strong, movingly depicting Enid and her life and her conflicted loyalties. I think the structure of this collection, each story more like a chapter than a standalone piece, makes the ending less satisfying, bending it into a preordained shape.

“Pterodactyl We Meet Again” has perhaps this collection’s most strained pun for its title. Fitting for the story that leans most into absurd humor. In a book crammed full of Jurassic Park franchise references, this story takes the extra step and brings us to “an island off the coast of Costa Rica,” where cryptid-sighting blogger (and bumbling goofus) Josh investigates reports of prehistoric creatures emerging from a wormhole. The humor gets laid on a bit thickly for my personal taste (there’s even the old chestnut about “the P is silent”), but I still had a good time.

“Joan of Archaeopteryx” (original version published 2021) was a bright spot in the bleak Apex: World of Dinosaurs anthology, and it more than holds its own here. It might be my favorite story in the book: a blend of comic and deeply personal, deeply moving but also a hell of a good time.

“Polter-Gastonia” shifts gears a little bit, bringing us back to the conventional world, where Rosalinda, descendant of the old Hell Creekers who stayed behind to guard the wormhole, has to get creative to defeat industrial development threatening the portal. Fun story!

“Don’t Cry for Me Argentinosaurus” (original version published 2021) is another one of my favorite stories here, and not just because I picked it for The Mesozoic Reader. It’s a fun wrinkle on the time portal formula: Veronica returns to the modern world after an extensive stay in Avalonia, only to be marketed as a pinup cavegirl. A sweet story of homesickness and feeling lost in time, and also about how capitalism destroys everything.

“Prehistoric in Pink” jumps us a few decades into the future, after the events of the previous story revealed the existence of Avalonia to the people of Earth. It is a world of discreet time tourism via stable wormholes, slightly reminiscent of Swanwick’s Bones of the Earth. The story itself is a teenage slice of life centering (naturally) on prom (and ecoterrorism). It also has the most audaciously bad dad-joke in the book. I quite liked it.

“Iguanodon Quixote” might be my favorite punning title of all time. The story itself is a courtroom scene interspersed with what led to the narrator participating in the act of ecoterrorism that delayed the industrial exploitation of Avalonia. A bit scattershot, but in the end, satisfying.

“Allosaurus through the Looking Glass” wraps things up by bringing back the narrator of the first “Allosaurus” story, older and wiser and more aware of the importance of stories, pulling threads together in the background of history, packing a lot of Whovian timeline manipulation into a tidy package. It was unexpectedly moving, a fitting culmination of this uneven but undeniably brilliant collection.

Undoubtedly the best dinosaur fiction book of this millennium.

2026 read #8: Magica Riot by Kara Buchanan.

Magica Riot by Kara Buchanan

239 pages

Published 2024

Read from February 10 to February 13

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Magica Riot has become something of a sensation in the queer small press world. It’s sold thousands of copies, which is practically unheard of in our sphere, and has an active fandom bursting with character art and social media presence, all things I doubt my own writing will ever inspire. (For comparison, my first self-published book has moved exactly twenty copies to date, three months after its release. The one review I’ve seen, while positive, misgendered me.) I haven’t been avoiding this book; I bought a copy, after all. But it can be almost intimidating to wade into a work with such fan presence. What if I don’t like it?

Small chance of that happening. I mean, it’s a 21st century War for the Oaks, complete with a punk band, except it centers on queer magical girls in Portland rather than fae courts in Minneapolis. Of course I'm gonna dig it.

Buchanan’s characters and setting pop from the page with efficient turns of phrase. As a writer, I tend toward the artsy and over-written. I agonize for days over individual word choices, getting in my own way more often than I actually craft worthwhile sentences. So I both appreciate and envy a fellow self-published author who can turn out zippy prose that tells the story and invests the reader with what they need to know, with a minimum of fuss. The first chapter, in particular, does an excellent job of establishing the narrator, the titular band, the book’s vibe, and the extradimensional dangers besetting Portland.

As a loving (and lovingly queer) tribute to the magical girl genre, Riot’s quips and combat can get as repetitive as the enemy-of-the-week episodes of Sailor Moon. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t going fuck flam yeah throughout.

2026 read #7: Dinotopia Lost by Alan Dean Foster.*

Dinotopia Lost by Alan Dean Foster*

319 pages

Published 1996

Read from February 5 to February 10

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

Such is the sad state of dinosaur fiction that Alan Dean Foster, mercenary page-filler and franchise novelist, treats us to better prose here than we find in most novels I’ve put under that tag. Which isn’t to say it’s good prose. It’s workmanlike at best, often belaboring us with over-description. It’s the sort of storytelling that gives adverbs and introductory clauses a bad rep. Yet Dinotopia Lost’s prose still comes out ahead of Cretaceous Dawn, The Sky People, and especially Triassic. (But then, I’ve read Facebook comment sections better written than Triassic. Less misogynistic, too.)

I read Dinotopia Lost sometime around 2002, and don’t recall a single thing about it. To be fair to my past self, there just isn’t much to remember here. The Prehistoric Pulp blog describes it as “Treasure Island [thrown together with] a lighthearted Jurassic Park,” but I have to disagree; that sounds so much more interesting than what we get here. It is, in fact, astoundingly dull.

The actual plot is “What if some meanies came to utopia?” But the pirates, and the narrative, get distracted by other matters before the idea can be explored. The characters, despite pages of physical description, never develop greater depth than a cardboard standee. And bereft of James Gurney’s iconic artwork, it turns out that talking dinosaurs don’t interest me all that much. The one exception, a Deinonychus ascetic who studied martial arts and wishes to meditate his way out of samsara, arrives too late to make much difference. (It also illustrates the broad stereotypes Foster traffics in.)

Still, I’ve read so many worse things. Especially where dinosaurs are concerned. At least the dream of the nineties is alive in Dinotopia.

2026 read #6: My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna van Veen.

My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna van Veen

379 pages

Published 2024

Read from January 29 to February 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

This year, I hope to read books I truly want to read, instead of bulking up my numbers with disposable pulp that just happens to be brief. Reading for numbers has had a regrettable effect on what I read. I’ve been completely neglecting contemporary full-length fantasy, one of my favorite categories. I think I only read a couple of them all last year. Time to change that!

My partner R read this book just about a year ago, and loved it enough to recommend it in the highest terms. After reading it, I have to concur. Van Veen’s prose is understated yet beautiful, dispassionately depicting horrors of living and dead alike. The Dutch countryside is a character all its own, vividly described, haunted by the misty ghosts of wetlands.

As an abused young girl in the aftermath of World War II, Roos becomes attached to a spirit she names Ruth. Ghosts, in van Veen’s inventive worldbuilding, only linger when the body itself does; Ruth’s body has tanned for centuries in a bog, giving her spirit the classic appearance of a bog body. A mysterious widow named Agnes purchases Roos’s autonomy from her horrid guardian. It turns out Agnes, too, is attached to an ancient spirit of her own. But that’s just the beginning of Dreadful’s Gothic turns.

My favorite thing about this book is the conceit of truly ancient ghosts. More stories should incorporate ghosts from millennia ago. But even without that particular niche interest, this is a beautifully rendered tragedy of obsession, possession, and trauma. An outstanding book.

2026 read #5: Queens of the Abyss, edited by Mike Ashley.

Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird, edited by Mike Ashley

350 pages

Published 2020

Read from January 25 to January 29

Rating: 2 out of 5

I collect old magazines. I have a lot of them. I want to make a point of reading some of them this year, especially as I make progress on my current novel project and hope to focus my energies back on short story writing later this year. So I plan to read short stories, ideally in the form of old magazines I own, for at least 20% of the reviews I write this year—the collapse of my nation, of course, permitting.

Naturally, I’m beginning this pattern with an anthology instead of a magazine.

This is another entry in the British Library Tales of the Weird series, featuring a selection of women authors from the heyday of pulp short fiction. I’ve read just one of these stories before, which is unusual after all the anthologies I’ve encountered in recent years. My partner R got it for me for the holidays, and I’ve been looking forward to it. Or as much as one can look forward to anything days, I suppose.

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“A Revelation” by Mary E. Braddon (1888). The author’s life is more interesting than this story, which is a rote gothic ghost number featuring clumsy descriptions, amateurish exposition, racist caricatures, and a see-through plot. It ends with an absurdly convenient twist and a middle aged man marrying his dead friend’s teenage child. It’s very much 1880s magazine fare. Not a promising start. F

“The Sculptor’s Angel” by Marie Corelli (1913). This medieval tale of an artistic monk who takes advantage of a poor young woman, only to be visited with dramatic irony after her death, is at least a step up from the previous story. We get some ever-relevant commentary on “the pitiless egotism of men,” though I think the narrative lets the sculptor off too easily. Perhaps a solid D

“From the Dead” by Edith Nesbit (1892). After his new wife confesses a past deception to him, our narrator, against his own conscience, gives her the cold shoulder. She disappears, only to summon him to her deathbed some months later. This being the type of story it is, he arrives too late. Macabre melodrama though it may be, it serves as an empowerment fantasy: maybe, somehow, even if by paranormal means, men might be made to suffer the consequences of their actions. I think we all can vibe with that right now. C-

“The Christmas in the Fog” by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1914). This quasi-autobiographical anecdote begins with about seven pages of justification (almost a third of the essay) for why a quasi-autobiographical anecdote is worth writing down and being read. The incident itself sees the author, referring to herself in the third person as the Romantick Lady, stuck for three days in an unusually Londonish smog on the Mersey. She decides to scrape together some kind of Christmas gift for each of the 150 immigrant children down in steerage. It ends with her musing whether her self-appointed charity might have “planted the seeds of pauperism” in the poor children. Horrors! All in all, you couldn’t get more pre-war 1910s than this.

“The Haunted Flat” by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1920). Banal self-improvement-aided-by-a-spirit yarn. I liked the small domestic details of a young working woman setting herself up in a rental flat. The identity of the helpful spirit is an absurd coincidental twist of the sort beloved by religious revivalists (including, in this instance, Spiritualists). D?

“A Modern Circe” by Alicia Ramsey (1919). Ramsey lays it on a bit thick with Italian stereotypes, up to and including labeling Italians a “primitive race,” but otherwise her writing is quick and modern, her descriptions evocative, and the titular “Mad Virgin” is positively delightful after a slog through generic ghost tales. Possibly C-

“The Nature of the Evidence” by May Sinclair (1923). Another piece inclined to Spiritualism, this time an account of well-to-do heterosexual unhappiness involving the man’s late first wife. Well-written, and interesting for hinting at ghost-fucking at such an early date, but otherwise forgettable. D+

“The Bishop of Hell” by Marjorie Bowen (1925). This story begins with more promise and unique vibes than anything else in this anthology so far. A defrocked priest in the late 18th century, so dissipated that his intimates give him the nickname in the title, hatches a desire to corrupt the bride of his generous cousin and benefactor. The story is twenty shades of purple, but enjoyably so. C

“The Antimacassar” by Greye La Spina (1949). I read and reviewed this story in Women of Weird Tales. There, I said, “I enjoyed the element of loom-weaving; the hidden message in the antimacassar was an interesting touch that deserved a better story.”

“White Lady” by Sophie Wenzel Ellis (1933). Brought down by clumsy prose and absurd dialogue (“Now, as always, you prefer your unnatural flowers to me”), this story of a woman competing with an anthropomorphic flower for the affections of her fiancée gets points for embracing its own pulpy ridiculousness. C

“The Laughing Thing” by G. G. Pendraves (1929). The prose and atmosphere of this Hudson Valley-set haunting were fine. Pendraves’ dialogue was another matter, hammering obvious plot points into the ground; it takes the better part of two pages for an old man, fleeced on a land deal, to fully articulate just how hard he’s going to haunt the place once he’s dead. (“Wha-a-a-at?” responds the swindler.) Still, a solid example of its type. C-

“Candlelight” by Lady Eleanor Smith (1931). I believe this tale of middle class philandering is meant to be humorous, or at least ironic. An awkward dinner party is interrupted by the arrival of a Romani girl from the woods, who gets goaded into telling their fortunes (and spilling all their tawdry secrets). Altogether on the wrong side of 1930s pulp, and felt interminable to boot. D-

“The Wonderful Tune” by Jessie Douglas Kerruish (1931). Snowed in at a Swiss inn, the narrator and his companions find themselves in the company of a master violinist, who plays elf music that compels all things to dance—including the avalanche-crushed corpses stashed in the other room. Somewhat ridiculous in the way all the “OooOooh, watch out, a corpse!” stories were, but not painfully bad. D+?

“Island of the Hands” by Margaret St. Clair (1952). Out of every story on the TOC, I’d been looking forward to this one the most. Immediately, we find ourselves in the hands (hehe) of a storytelling professional. Garth is a watery planet that feels remarkably like a midcentury floatplane-and-cabana getaway. That’s just set-dressing for a standard (but well-written) Weird Island story. Aside from the inevitable skeeviness of midcentury heterosexuality, I enjoyed this one quite a bit. If only more of the anthology had been like this! B-

“The Unwanted” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1951). Our narrator is climbing Alabama hills for the census when she happens upon a broad Appalachian stereotype (because boy howdy did midcentury writers love Appalachian stereotypes). The mountain man points a gun at her and tells her to leave. But the woman of the house invites her up to chat, and we quickly find ourselves in a gentle, sad, unclassifiable tale of motherhood and lost children. Just as quickly, this story went from forgettable page-filler to a minor wonder (however dated and iffy it might be for modern readers). B-

“The Seventh Horse” by Leonora Carrington (1943). A surreal little fable about a horse (or a woman?) in a garden. One of the best (and weirdest) stories I’ve ever read from the 1940s. B+

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And that’s it! After slogging through so many forgettable ghost stories, the last few entries were an unexpected delight.

2026 read #4: Wildwood by Colin Meloy.

Wildwood by Colin Meloy

Illustrated by Carson Ellis

544 pages

Published 2011

Read from January 10 to January 24

Rating: 3 out of 5

In the early years of this blog, I must have checked this book out of the library half a dozen times. I never did read it, though, put off by its ever-so-slightly-too-precious opening. After a while it slipped out of my mental must-read pile.

An odd pop culture conjunction brought it back to mind. In the Dropout comedy special Demi Adejuyigbe: Is Going to Do One (1) Backflip, there’s a bit where Adejuyigbe gets a staged phone call from a character who introduces himself: “It’s me! Colin Meloy! Lead singer of the Decemberists!” This bit became a vocal stim for my partner and me, a harmless bright spot during this dismal dystopian winter. It led to me getting back into the Decemberists, and it led to R purchasing and reading a copy of Wildwood. I’m reading it now on their recommendation.

First of all, it is really hard to read a heroic children’s adventure novel at a time when fascists openly wage civil war upon the decent folk of one’s country. I would read for a page or two, hit a wall of who cares about any of this right now, and go back to doomscrolling. Not a great mindset for a fair book review.

Secondly, either because of the book’s pacing or my own admittedly distracted reading, I felt it took a while for Wildwood to hit its stride. Again, maybe that’s my fault. I wanted it to be a “magic hidden in the heart of the city” urban fantasy, something along the lines of War for the Oaks or Wizard of the Pigeons, but from the pen that produced “The Mariner’s Revenge Song.” Instead, it’s a talking animal fable for precocious readers, with a pinch of Portlandia.

For a book called Wildwood, it has an unexpected amount of towns, gas lamps, mail trucks, and paddywagons. It isn’t until the halfway point that the setting comes into its own and begins to feel like a distinct addition to the atlas of fantastika: a charming melding of urban and bucolic, highwaymen and talking coyotes, ghostly bridges and rain forests. It’s in these details that Meloy’s storytelling genius shows through. That, and the indomitable power of people resisting evil overlords and secret police. Turns out there was a reason to care about this after all.