Bill Racicot

I was a little uncertain about requesting this book from Early Reviewers. I enjoy a good fantasy story, and themed anthologies can be fun, but the title and the rather lurid cover did make me wonder whether the contents were likely to consist of schmoopy supernatural romance, or possibly softcore elf-fetish porn, neither of which holds much appeal for me. I felt greatly reassured, though, when I read the introduction, in which one of the editors writes, "A talented author sees a theme like show more that and says, 'That will be terrible unless...'" Which seems to me to be exactly the right attitude to take towards this kind of topic; that "unless" holds the possibility for generating all kinds of creative and worthwhile ideas. And the authors represented here do mostly seem to have taken that kind of approach and gone looking for non-traditional angles on the subjects of elves and love. There's lots of modern-day settings here, lots of alternative sexuality, lots of little idea-based stories...

However, most of the contributors seem to be first-time or relatively inexperienced writers, and I'm afraid it does show. Generally, the stories aren't bad, and a several of them are quite pleasant reads, but almost none of them feels truly, completely satisfying. There are stories with interesting ideas that aren't fleshed out fully, and, conversely, ones with ideas too slight to sustain a whole story without some extra spark that just isn't there. There are decent premises executed in adequate but unengaging prose, and one piece that has lovely prose but is so obscurely written that it's impossible to tell what it's actually about. There are stories that are trying a little too hard to be dark and gritty, or attempting to do social commentary with too heavy a hand, or both at once. One of the best-written stories seems to exist mainly to lead up to a surprise ending that contains no surprise whatsoever. Another is a noir-ish detective pastiche that's rather delightful, until the realization sets in that it really just inelegantly and rather pointlessly grafts elves onto a hardboiled detective tale that would have been better off without them. (And according to the author's note, in which he confesses to essentially lifting the plot from someone else's novel, probably was.) And so on.

Bottom line: It's better than it looks, but not nearly as good as it could be. show less

This was a good collection of stories centered on what happens after the happily ever after event in fairy tales.

Some of my favorite stories were:

"The Spyder" where Ms Muffet gets revenge on the spider by using the Dark Arts.

"A Wolf's Guide to the Fairy Tale" which is a self help guide for the Big Bad Wolf to capturing and successfully eating Little Red Riding Hoods.

"Snovhit" where the prince finds out that Snow White is not herself after being brought back from the Dead and has to work with show more the Dwarfs in order to cage her to protect his kingdom.

And my most favorite story of the collection, "What Makes Them Tick" about a Psychologist whose clients are all characters out of fairy tales and some of those sessions.

A quick and entertaining read. show less

I like small presses - some of them have distinctive voices, some of them simply print whatever their editors like. But in all cases they give chances to authors that cannot or would not sign with a big publisher. And a lot of the small presses will publish short stories anthologies - it is easier to try to please more readers with different stories from different authors than to try to publish the next big novel.

So when I saw that book in the Early Reviewers list, I decided to give it a show more try - small press, anthology (and I love reading short fiction), fantasy - I had picked up books for less reasons than that. And when I got the book and started reading it, I had quite low expectations - I like this type of anthologies but the quality is rarely great so I had learned not to expect too much.

Unfortunately the problems start even before the stories - implying that fantasy is not mature reading and the explanation about what they decided to print is weird. In a bad way. That's a new press -- alienating everyone is a bad idea. There is NO mention anywhere what any of the editors consider good literature (besides the dedication to Tolkien... even though the way it is done it sounds more like an attempt of a witty line that matches the anthology theme than a real dedication... might be wrong though). You just cannot explain how you want to print "things that do not suck" without explaining what you like.

And then there is the very strange decision to preface every story with a line from the story (just above the author/story bio). Usually an important line. Sometimes a line that ruins part of the story - because knowing that this line is coming, you see some things differently -- sometimes it might lead you in the wrong direction but these are short stories -- in most cases as soon as you start reading, you know what is coming because of that line. I stopped reading these lines after the first few stories and then checked them after I read the story itself -- some of them just had no work there.

But let's concentrate on the stories for a while - 20 stories overall - 1 graphic and 19 traditional ones. None of them really stands out - they rate between average and plain weird (with a few being almost unreadable). And even if a few did have a potential, it was lost quite fast - a good idea and a good first few paragraphs do not make a good story when the plot get lost midway and the end is simply predictable. And despite the claim that the anthology aims at showing the elves in a new light, that never happens -- none of the stories even tries to get out of the stereotypes - both for elves portrayals and for the type of stories - a lot of the stories are trying to sound as something they are not - noir stories, fairy tale stories, you name it. They try and fail - almost as if the authors tried to fit into a framework that just does not fit their work. The only story that really worked for me was "Of Roots and Rings" (the graphic story) - the medium and the fact that the story needed to be concise allowed the author not to screw up and finish the story badly. Not that even that one is a masterpiece or really original. But compared to the rest of the stories - it does stand out. And the sad thing is that some of these stories could have been saved if someone had worked with the author (or if the author had edited the story...)

And then there is the cover. Technically the cover kinda matches the topic. But it is so cliched... and the barely dressed elf-lady is unneeded -- there is a difference between love and sex... and the cover fits the second one better.

Is that the worse anthology I had read? No, not really. Even when the stories were failing at the end, some of them did have something in them. But it is not exactly a good one either and not something I would recommend. I would pick the next book from the publisher though (depends on the topic of course but if they stay in the fantasy/borderline genres, I will give them one more chance). show less

This was painful. Look, it's a small-press anthology, and my expectations were really essentially for something that would be all right, maybe cute, mostly forgettable, and I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised. That this came down on the disappointing still, despite these limited expectations, is unfortunate, I'd say. I'm glad that the people who contributed to this sounded like they were having fun, and I think some of the pieces may have been improved with some more revision and work, show more but some of them (Elvis was the heir to an elf kingdom? The real provenance of fairy dust?) were probably never going to go anywhere, and others probably maxed out the limited value of the particular stories they wanted to tell. There are a couple of good stories in here; I liked To Kill the Oak King, for example. But that said, it's hard to tell if that story was good in its own right, or if it was good in the context of the other stories around it.

I don't like going on and ripping books when I don't feel I have anything intelligent to say about them that I can't sum up easily, so let's leave it at this: I would be remarkably surprised if it turned out this wasn't the worst book I read this year. I wish these people luck in the future, but there it is. show less