358 pages
Published 2007
Read from October 27 to November 8
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I wish I had Rich Horton's job. While my ideal editorial role would be primary editor of a professional fantasy magazine, I've come to fantasize about getting paid to read through existing publications and anthologizing my favorite pieces. Ideally, of course, I'd prefer to be free to pull my favorite stories from any market and any year, not just the current pro markets, but no one's gonna pay me to anthologize the book I want to read, so I have to do it on my own, mentally, in bits and pieces, by combing bygone anthologies like this one. Maybe someday I'll luck into a stash of old genre mags and have even more material at my disposal.
I should note that these stories were actually published in 2006.
"Journey into the Kingdom" by M. Rickert. A low-key and quite seductive ghost story that abruptly and violently goes places I wasn't expecting. The story within a story within a story format sure helped keep me guessing where it was all going. A disturbing allegory for the intimacy of creative writing, and how readers can invest the emotional resonance of your work with illusions of something shared and possessive and secret between the two of you. Personally, I'm not a fan of "Was it supernatural or was he CRAZY??" endings; that shit was old hat many decades ago. Otherwise pretty good.
"The Water-Poet and the Four Seasons" by David J. Schwartz. A delicate construction of economical beauty, all the more affecting for its brevity. I almost feel a little sad that I've read so much stuff this year that this kind of thing no longer feels immediately life-changing, the way it would have even a year ago. Now I can only say this was a really good little story, not even one of my all time favorites, just really really good.
"Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)" by Geoff Ryman. Weaving a fairy tale of sorts around one of the twentieth century's most horrific dictators is a bold move. Using the medium of supernatural fantasy to process the deaths of almost a million people is ambitious beyond the aims of most writers, but carries with it the possibility of trivializing real life genocide if the result is not a consummate work of passion, genius, and sensitivity. Or at least that's my opinion. Ryman aims very high indeed with this piece, and while the elements for success are there -- evocative imagery, precise use of language, a potentially interesting central character -- somehow it falls short for me. The individual elements offer moments of brilliance but never cohere into a great story.
"The Osteomancer's Son" by Greg van Eekhout. Strong on concept, weak on story and emotion. A deliciously creepy depiction of magic led me to expect terrific things, but the thief-pulls-one-last-heist-for-the-good-of-his-family boilerplate and standard-issue dark evil wizard villain lacked bite.
"Salt Wine" by Peter S. Beagle. There aren't enough creepy merpeople stories out there. Or maybe there are, and I just haven't read them yet. This one is excellent, melancholy and moving, just as you'd expect from Beagle.
"The Original Word for Rain" by Peter Higgins. An average-ish story that builds in an adequate way toward a disappointing ending. Plenty of genre writers can fashion believable, interesting romance within the confines of short fiction -- most recently, I appreciated Connie Willis' "Chance" and James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" for their vivid, realistic romantic aspects -- but a lot of writers should stay far, far away from the subject. This guy falls into the second category. "Man falls in love with a woman who thinks of him as a friend, and then he does something stupid when he meets her boyfriend" is such a tiresome, unrewarding cliche -- even if "something stupid" means "trigger the End Times" as it does here.
"The Lineaments of Gratified Desire" by Ysabeau S. Wilce. There is a broad transition zone between whimsical on one end and wacky on the other. As mileposts between the two extremes, I might cite Catherynne M. Valente's Fairyland series as a mostly winsome, mostly whimsical example, and Piers Anthony's Xanth series as mostly wacky, mostly wankery garbage. After hearing about Wilce's Califa series recently (I forget where), I was looking forward to this entry, but alas, "Lineaments" skews closer to wacky than whimsical. There were moments I liked, such as the Corn Sirens scene, but on the whole, "Magickal rock-n-roller must track down his royal four-year-old betrothed in a demonic carnival on supernatural Halloween" is too Xanthian for my tastes; matters are not helped by infantilized, blog-like prose, where the child in question is named "Tiny Doom" and much transpires in the realm of "yums" and "tums," and the fluffy stuffed pig inevitably has vast interdimensional powers exceeding those of a god. That sort of thing lost its appeal when I outgrew Invader Zim. (Maybe passing through a Zim phase confers immunity from ever finding the word "Doom" funny again.)
"Journey to Gantica" by Matthew Corradi. A charming little fable of home and family and finding yourself in order to find where you belong, only to find it was where you started from in the first place. As a Statement of the Human Condition, this was pretty much wasted on me; it's hard for me to identify with abstract concepts of home and belonging, which are really cultural assumptions, illustrating only a small portion of human variation and experience. But this is becoming too abstract a criticism for such a bubble of a story, so I'll quit now.
"Irregular Verbs" by Matthew Johnson. A melancholy, conceptually beautiful fable of loss and the inexpressible shared understandings that grow between lovers and wither away after widowing or separation, couched in terms of anthropological linguistics -- the best terms of all. As a Statement of the Human Condition, I thought this was just about perfect.
"A Fish Story" by Sarah Totton. Another not particularly funny "funny" story that showed promise for a few pages before slapping you across the face with its moral as if it were a trout. Even if you read this as a send-up of courtly romance, it's still way too heavy-handed for my taste. No fishing story can ever compare to "God's Hooks!", anyway.
"The Night Whiskey" by Jeffrey Ford. Delightfully chilling body horror, reminding me, winningly, of Margo Lanagan's "Mulberry Boys," from The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition. As is unfortunately common with short form genre fiction, Ford can't quite stick the landing; the closing "So my girlfriend and I left town and tried to put all this behind us, but sometimes I think of it still" does not do justice to what came before. Nonetheless my favorite story in this book.
"A Fine Magic" by Margo Lanagan. Speaking of Lanagan... I had high expectations for this piece, given how much I enjoyed "Mulberry Boys" earlier this year. Unfortunately, like "A Fish Story," it's another "funny" tale about obsessive amatory pursuit and its fallout. This had vivid imagery, well-described, but once the carousel appeared, it was pretty easy to guess the general direction of the fascinator's "vengeance."
"Naturally" by Daniel Handler. Ghost stories must have been all the rage in 2006. This one is weary, a ghost-shaped gauze of Weltschmerz wound around the quotidian tragedies and tiny defeats of ordinary life, told with an odd fourth-wall-breaking narrative device that insists (as if doubting the reader will care or take it to heart) that the details of the story don't matter, that all stories and loves and lives are variations on a theme. A solid entry.
"Moon Viewing at Shijo Bridge" by Richard Parks. Solid historical fantasy, nothing to complain about. A trifle workmanlike -- the characters, the narrator in particular, are uninspired archetypes -- but adequate.
"Citrine: A Fable" by Elise Moser. Horton's introduction, rather unnecessarily, comments that this is a "feminist piece" -- that much is indisputable. But what sort of feminism is being offered here? I might quibble, for instance, with Horton's reading that Citrine is "freed" by the painter's magic. The closing lines left me with an impression of a different sort of imprisonment for Citrine, what with all the strong, healthy, beautiful, smiling women coming out of the proverbial woodwork. Either Moser deliberately wove in the Stepford vibe, delivering an interesting new layer of deeper commentary, or this story is really that naive. "And all the women were happy orchard sisters forever once freed from men" is a second generation feminist fantasy; encountering it in 2006, without that extra wrinkle of meaning I want to read into it, feels more than a little anachronistic.
"A Siege of Cranes" by Benjamin Rosenbaum. This has that classic Heroic Fantasy thing going on, hardcore. There are the peaceful pseudo-Mesopotamian villages destroyed and desolated by the White Witch; there are the deliberate anachronisms, such as the mounted and armored knights, the soul-sucking blue glow in the living rooms, and the futuristic city of the djinn; and of course there's the enormous flesh-chariot made of the body parts of everyone you've ever loved or known. Lacking in emotional punch, aside from the easy authorial manipulation of dead children, but entertaining as hell.
I'm somewhat disappointed with this collection. Either 2006 was a middling-poor year for fantasy fiction, or else Horton wasn't very good at his job back then; this book is full of okay entries, but no lasting greats.
No comments:
Post a Comment