Stories

April 26, 2010
This collection of 27 never-before published stories from an impressive cast—Roddy Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates, and Stuart O’Nan, among others—sets out to shift genre paradigms. The overarching theme is “fantastic fiction,” or “fiction of the imagination,” with “fantasy” being used in the most broad-sweeping sense rather than signaling the familiar commercial staples of elves, ghouls, and robots. Consequently, the collection’s offerings run a wide gamut. In Joe Hill’s “Devil on the Staircase,” an Italian boy commits a crime of passion and subsequently meets an emissary of Satan. In Jodi Picoult’s “Weights and Measures,” a young couple who have just lost their daughter struggle to hold their marriage together as they both start noticing strange changes taking place. Chuck Palahniuk’s “The Loser” features a college kid on acid as a contestant on a game show, and in Kurt Andersen’s “Human Intelligence,” a geologist meets an explorer from another planet who has been studying humans for the past 1,600 years. The range of voices and subjects practically guarantees something for any reader, but the overall quality is frustratingly variable: most stories are good, some aren’t, and few are exceptional.

May 15, 2010
The editorial collaboration of fantasy superstar Gaiman and brilliant anthologist Sarrantonio seemingly ensures a most distinguished sf-fantasy-horror collection. Mainstream and mystery stars (Roddy Doyle, Jodi Picoult, Carolyn Parkhurst, Jeffery Deaver, Walter Mosley, Chuck Palahniuk) as well as big sf-fantasy-horror names, including all-ages luminaries Diana Wynne Jones and Richard Adams, all contribute. Yet most of these stories are tepid; a few are unreadably bad. Joe R. Lansdales The Stars Are Falling proves absorbing, though (and because) its characters, plot, and setting strongly recall those of Robinson Jeffers searing antiwar poem, The Double Axe. Gene Wolfes space-exploration tale Leif in the Wind is a tersely worded treat, Joe Hills Devil on the Staircase is cleverly shaped (literally: the paragraphs look like flights of stairs), and Michael Moorcocks memoirlike Stories, while neither sf, fantasy, or horror, is wonderfully affecting. And Elizabeth Hands awe-inspiring The Maiden Flight of McCauleys Bellerophon, in which three men and two teen boys replicate the flight of a preWright brothers airplane, is as magical and beautiful a light fantasy as anyone has ever written.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)