I enjoyed this book.

A more interesting collection (at least to me) than the Kathe Koja collection. Some stories I didn't like (it's rare I like all the stories in an anthology, especially a multi-author anthology), but in general I found the stories interesting and, more importantly, readable. I think it's important for a short story to be information-rich and not too experimental. Virtually all the stories are set in the UK and all treat with the landscape in some way or another. In some cases it's memory - revisiting places that were important to the protagonist, in others it's current action. Recommended.

NOTE: I won a free eBook copy of this book in MOBI format from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers (July 2021).

The subtitle of this anthology is "Weird Landscapes"--a fitting description for the volume in its entirety. Most of the stories use setting as a key element in their plot development. The result is a collection of tales that are often eerie and sometimes unsettling, and always veering into unexpected territory. Some stories are more abstract than others and kind of lost me, which weakened the collection as a whole. However, I found each entry unique and enjoyed the reading experience.

Here are my reactions to each individual story:
"Between Skin and Sea:" Out with the old, in with the new.
"All That Dead Beauty:" Back to the garden, but not really.
"The White Wood:" Kind of reminded me of "The Woman In Black."
"Bog Goddess:" Salvation is found when you least expect it.
"Parrot’s Drumble:" Poem painting in prose.
"Ochre and Faience:" The Reaper took a roundabout path.
"A Hard Country to Die In:" Like one of those rambling stories your grandmother tells you whilst in your crib.
"Lightening Rose Biggin:" The birth of a mermaid.
"The Green Calling:" Got "Avatar" and "The Shape of Water" vibes from this one.
"The Mydford Medusa:" A neat and creepy tale with a conservationist bent.
"Sanatorium:" Wow, what a freaky poem! Read it twice for the full effect. Eerie and haunting in all the right ways.
"The Lighthouse:" Very "Twilight Zone"-esque, complete with multiple mental breakdowns. The quest for the lighthouse briefly reminded me of Gatsby and the green light.
"The Winter Wife:" A journey towards one’s destiny. (i.e., Death?)
"The Road to Tempol:" An excursion into astral travel. . . .
"Crabtree Field:" We all could use a sanctuary of renewal.
"On Venus Street:" A window into the future, life, and death.
"Work - Die, Heh Heh:" Everyone's drunk.
"Borderline:" Ennui and journalism.
"Icarus Fall:" A note from God? ( )

The late Storm Constantine, as a closing note from the publisher states, selected the stories in this collection and emailed it whole-cloth to the publishers. Her goal to bring together stories, "take the reader deep into the strangeness of the landscape, where reality flickers like summer's heat." As a theme, landscapes is broad, but in many ways are already an integral part of the Weird. Each story features it's (mostly English) landscapes as part of the motivating weirdness that make the world seem odd.

There are several excellent stories here. Paula Wakefield's "A Hard Country to Die In", a haunted murder story in the form of small-town gossip, and Andrew Hook's disorienting "All that Dead Beauty' might have been my favorites, each taking a very different angle to the strange force of a weird landscape. Constantine's own contribution, "THE GREEN CALLING", is a science fiction fantasy of the older things that may exist in the jungle, and how they move a human beyond themselves. There are ghost stories, Kafkaesque surreal nightmares, and things that might just be normal if not for one... small... thing. Unfortunately, there were also a number of flat characters, and a modern Lovecraft pastiche that spent a long time getting just about where you expected it to

In total, some very excellent prose and ideas here. But don't feel bad if you decide a few pages in to skip a few.

I tried and I tried to really like this collection, but somehow it just kept falling flat for me. Maybe my expectations didn't align. Maybe I just don't read enough fantasy. Several of the offerings started out ok and then led to nowhere. I don't want to dismiss it, because it think it does have an audience - I'm just not it. ( )