Smoke and Mirrors - Neil Gaiman

It takes a certain knack to write short stories, an entirely different knack from writing long-form fiction, and it's one that I think Gaiman possesses.  I've read some of his short stories before, in Trigger Warning, and was glad to read some more.  As with his other story collections, these are fantasy stories.  Gaiman breaks down why he wrote each of them in the foreword of the book, and also includes a little bonus story that you'd  miss if you just skipped straight to the first listed story.  But as with any collection, not everything here can be a total hit.

I don't plan on breaking down every bit of this book; that would take forever.  But here were the high points: "Troll Bridge," about a young man who repeatedly encounters a troll who wants to eat his life; "The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories," bits of which are apparently true (which bits?) and takes place on a surreal trip to Los Angeles; "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar," which is Lovecraft-inspired; "Bay Wolf," which is Beowulf told as if it's an episode of Baywatch; and "Snow, Glass, Apples," which is a creepy retelling of Snow White.  For low points, I would say that the poetry isn't my favorite; "Vampire Sestina" is nice but the rest I could pretty much take or leave.

The stories here are pretty diverse in scope and include some racier things than I've seen in Gaiman's long-form work.  But while most of them were enjoyable, they weren't dazzling, and I can't see myself reaching for this again and again like I can with his novels.  Neverwhere, American Gods, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane in particular are so wonderful and magical, and I just didn't feel like any of the things in this could quite build up to the precedents that those had set for me.  But "Snow, Glass, Apples" is very good, and really reinforces that I love Gaiman's fairy tale-type stories.  He's written another one since this, which I actually read first, called "The Sleeper and the Spindle," which is also wonderful, and of course Stardust is delightful as well and The Ocean at the End of the Lane has a whimsy to it that's similar.

Overall, a nice collection but not something I can see myself reading again.  But it was nice to pick up and put down; I read some big chunks of it at once, but did find this was a better book to pick at rather than to just read.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Stars Above - Marissa Meyer (Lunar Chronicles #4.5)

It's become popular in recent years to YA authors to write a slew of short stories that accompany their full-length works.  Marissa Meyer is no different in that, around the time she released Winter, she also released this volume, Stars Above, comprised of short stories set in the Lunar Chronicles universe.  Most of them deal directly with the main characters from the series.

I'm a firm believer that authors don't "owe" short stories like this to their readers, and that when they're written, they typically don't really add much to the series.  That's definitely the case here.  There are nine stories of varying lengths in this book, and eight of them, while enjoyable, are just fine.  They don't really add anything to the Lunar Chronicles experience that wasn't laid out in the main works.  Yes, the stories expound a bit more upon things that were just mentioned in the main works, but they don't resolve any plot holes or offer any big revelations.

The big exception to this, as other reviewers have noted, is a wonderful gem of a story called "The Little Android."  It deals with none of the characters from the main books, though just as each main heroine's story was patterned after a fairy tale, so is this.  The story here is, of course, "The Little Mermaid," except the mermaid is an android who'd developing a personality and emotions of her own.  It's a beautiful, heart-wrenching story that fits into the world and helps expand on it without feeling the need to pander to fans.  If the stories in the collection had all been like this, I think I would have had a much higher opinion of the book as a whole than I actually ended up with.

The other stories are just okay.  There's one about Michelle Benoit getting Cinder and Scarlet, one about Cinder going to live with the Linh family, one about Wolf becoming a recruit in the Lunar army, one about Thorne while he was in school, one about Cress going to live in the satellite, another with background on Winter and Jacin, Cinder and Kai's meeting from Kai's perspective, and finally one that takes place after the end of the main Lunar Chronicles which details Scarlet and Wolf's wedding.  That was a cute one, but again, nothing that I absolutely couldn't live without and that I hadn't figured would happen anyway.

Overall, this is a cute addition to the series and it looks nice on the shelf, but there's only one real gem here.  Writing short stories is an art that requires a completely different set of skills than writing full-length novels, and if it hadn't been for "The Little Android," I would think that Meyer hadn't quite honed those skills yet.  "The Little Android" absolutely glowed, though, and I wish Meyer had taken the time to expand her universe rather than just her already-established stories, because that universe expansion is definitely what worked best here.

3 stars out of 5 for the whole.

Fantastic Creatures - H. L. Burke

Fantastic Creatures is an anthology of stories all featuring some (you guessed it) fantasy creature, from mermaids to werewolves to tree octopuses to hum fairies.  As an anthology, it has many, many authors, but I'm putting H. L. Burke as the primary because, from what I can see, she appears to be the one who organized it, did the outreach, etc.  (If someone knows differently, please let me know and I'll correct this.)  I'll include the author of each individual story with my description below.  Because of the nature of this book, I've done a short description or comment of each story with an individual rating for each, and the overall rating is an average of those.

But before I dive into the individual stories, a few overall comments about the book.  This an anthology by indie authors, and it shows.  While some stories are amazing, others need some work with plot structuring or even some light line editing.  The reading level also varies; while I would say most of these stories are perfectly enjoyable for an adult audience, there were a couple that I felt were meant for eight-to-ten-year-olds instead, giving the collection an uneven feel in regards to reading level.  "Three Steaks and a Box of Chocolates," "Seekers," "Skin Deep," "Priscilla the Magnificent, Flying Giant Squid," "Mother's Night Out," and "Absolutely True Facts about the Pacific Tree Octopus" were definitely the strongest stories in this volume, while "The Golden City Captives," "The Last Chronicle of Pete Mersill," and "Talori and the Shark" were probably the weakest, for various reasons.  Still, with a few exceptions I really liked this overall.  Now, for the individual ratings!

"Three Steaks and a Box of Chocolates" by A. R. Silverberry - A very good start to the collection featuring a Loch Ness Monster-type creature in a dying town.  The writing here reminded me of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, a gorgeous short story collection by Lauren van den Berg that all feature subtle elements of the supernatural.  This one was actually a bit short for my tastes; I would have loved to have seen this fleshed out a little bit more!  4 stars out of 5.

"Snapdragon" by Lea Doue - This was okay.  It's a pretty basic Princess and the Frog story, except the frog is a miniature dragon.  It had some nice fantasy elements--girls with a poison touch or thorns growing from their skins--but those felt more like changing the wallpaper on the story rather than doing anything really innovative.  3 stars.

"The Golden City Captives" by Julie C. Gilbert - Not a huge fan of this.  The reading level was much lower than that of the rest of the book and the story itself seemed to be missing a lot of background logic that could have made even a lower-reading-level story feel more appropriate for this collection.  2 stars.

"Seekers" by Intisar Khanani - This was the reason I requested an ARC of this book!  I love Khanani.  This is a lovely short story about a little girl and her mother who play at finding things, until one day the mother finds something that takes her away.  It has a beautiful sense of place and fantasy without ever explicitly saying anything, which I loved.  5 stars.

"Mystery of Asgina Lake" by Caren Rich - This was a solid story regarding plot and structure and characters but it needed some work regarding grammar, particularly comma usage.  3 stars.

"Skin Deep" by Morgan Smith - This was my favorite story in the collection.  It was beautifully, classically written, and while I'm not sure of how far the adaptation strayed from the original, the source story is apparently a Scandinavian story, which I think was a great addition to the collection as a whole.  5 stars.

"The Last Chronicle of Pete Mersill" by Cave Yates - This is a semi-post-apocalyptic story which stood out for that reason.  The writing style actually somewhat reminded me of that of the middle portion of Cloud Atlas, but without the confusing linguistic shift, and I was really enjoying it until the villains started monologue-ing, which dragged it down immensely for me.  3 stars.

"Priscilla the Magnificent, Flying Giant Squid" by L. Palmer - Another great story!  This is the only steampunk-inspired story in the collection which made it stand out.  It also has a sentient giant squid who learned Morse code from mermaids and wants to fly.  Absolutely charming.  4 stars.

"An Adventurer's Heart" by Nicole Zoltack - This was another one that didn't sit right for me.  I thought, at points, that this might end up being a story with a moral, like that revenge doesn't really work out and that people always have reasons for doing what they do, even if we at first can't see them.  Instead it was ultimately just a story about a girl who wants revenge on a creature going around and cutting other creatures' heads off in preparation.  2 stars.

"Destiny's Flight" by Frank B. Luke - This was a pretty typical fantasy story that had a religious bend.  That's not bad on its own, and I did like how it featured a more diverse cast of characters, at least culturally, but it got a bit preachy at the end. 2.5 stars.

"The Kappa" by Lelia Rose Foreman - This story was a great example of how a child can be a main character without the story actually being juvenile.  The setting and feel were again unique, which I appreciated, but I was left a little confused at the end, about who/what the cat was and why he had authority.  3 stars.

"Celebration" by Arthur Daigle - A story with humorous elements in which a bunch of goblins give a king a proper send-off.  At the beginning of this story, I thought it was going somewhere maybe a tad gruesome, but this was ultimately a very touching story that I enjoyed.  4 stars.

"The Nether Lands" by Cave Yates - This is Yates' second story in the collection and I think it was stronger than the first.  It features a demon hunter on a mission in the Netherlands who ends up partnered with a demon, and their attempts to avoid the "nether lands" where demons can trap people.  This was one of the more adult stories in the collection, with some definite violence and sexual tension going on. 4 stars.

"Talori and the Shark" by Jessica L. Elliot - One of the weaker stories here.  It's like Beauty and the Beast, but with mermaids, and it was a story in which I found internal logic really missing.  That's one of my biggest pet peeves, and it drove me absolutely crazy here.  Elliot tries to explain this away by saying "oh, it's magic, and magic doesn't work on logic," but it does, it just works on its own logic that the author determines, and not doing that here made this seem like a lazy story.  The writing also didn't appeal to me.  1.5 stars out of 5.

"Reviving the Sword" by Kandi J. Wyatt - A centaur with a would-be-magic sword travels with an elf and a gryphon.  There was some promising language here and the assortment of creatures in the band was interesting, but the story itself was overall unremarkable.  2.5 stars.

"Mother's Night Out" by D. G. Driver - Okay, this should really be "Mothers' Night Out" to be grammatically correct.  Now that that's off my chest, I can say that this was a strong story!  It was another of the more violent ones, and it has this sense of menace to it the whole time even though the main characters are in a nursery dealing with babies.  4 stars.

"The Mage and the Spotted Wyvern" by Craig J. Price, Jr. - A pretty typical, rather unremarkable sword-and-sorcery story about a young mage trying to learn magic.  But Freckles the frog was cool.  3 stars.

"The Very Last Dragon" by Katy Huth Jones - This was another story with some humorous elements, and the language here had a very bedtime-story feel without feeling like it was for eight-year-olds to read, if that makes sense.  But honestly, Golda Drake?  Our hero didn't see that coming?  Please.  3.5 stars.

"The Adventures of Zero: The Quest for Wormsroot" by Vincent Trigili - This is basically what "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" would be like if it was about a teenager in a fantasy setting.  A boy who daydreams of adventures actually ends up going on one.  It was fine.  3 stars.

"Ishka's Garden" by Bokerah Brumley - This was another story that seemed to be missing some background information.  I found everything that was hinted at here so much more intriguing than the story itself.  3 stars out of 5.

"Absolutely True Facts about the Pacific Tree Octopus" by H. L. Burke - This was another story that screamed "charming" to me, and another good one about a child that isn't actually juvenile.  It also had a good lesson attached and was a strong note to end the collection on.  4 stars.

So, when all of that is accounted for, it gives the collection as a whole a rating of 3.14 stars.  There are definitely some very strong stories here, and I think the collection as a whole was worth it, but there were a few weak ones that really dragged the stronger ones down, which is unfortunate.  Dropping the lowest-rated one here bumps the collection up to a 3.6, and I think that's more in line with the true value here.

I received a free advanced copy of this book; all opinions are my own.

Trigger Warning - Neil Gaiman

I love Neil Gaiman.  I do not love short stories.  I have not read Gaiman's other collections of short stories, though they're on the bookshelf waiting for my attention.  But the library had Trigger Warning available, and really, how could I resist?

I'm going to ignore the title on this one, because "trigger warning" is a really charged term right now, very politicized, and I don't want to get into that.  (But, for the sake of argument: I am against trigger warnings.  The world will not baby you, so why should people?  Also, I am a cold-hearted individual.)  Gaiman makes a kind of weak argument for the title of the collection, but honestly I think he could have found something better, because there doesn't really appear to be much in here that actually qualifies as a typical trigger warning--there's not sexual assault, which is the one that immediately comes to mind, no situations of abuse, no suicide, no... I mean, there's a lot of stuff, but not the stuff that normally falls into "trigger warning" discussions, so the title seems a bit off.

As for the stories themselves--they vary.  I definitely consider "The Truth Is A Cave In the Black Mountains," "The Sleeper and the Spindle," and "Black Dog," which are the three longest stories, to be the strongest pieces here.  "A Calendar of Tales" also had some very strong pieces included in it, though they all stand independent of each other and there's not a real thread tying them together.  The poetry was not up my ally (particularly "Making a Chair," which did not fit with the rest of the collection at all) but then most poetry isn't, and Gaiman characterizes the poems as "freebies," placed in addition to and not instead of other prose pieces.  Other bits, such as "The Lunar Labyrinth" and "Down to a Sunless Sea," I would have liked to see worked into longer pieces, something a little more fleshed out, because the premise intrigued me, but the end left me wanting more.  I suppose this is the goal of short stories, but there seemed to be so much potential lurking beyond the end of these pieces that I would have loved to see what Gaiman could do with it fully unleashed.

"The Sleeper and the Spindle" and "The Truth Is A Cave In the Black Mountains" have both been re-worked by Gaiman and some partners into illustrated volumes; I haven't read either of them, but I can see why that was done, definitely.  They come across as the most fairytale like (and one of them is, of course, based on fairytales) and have just the sort of menace and whimsy that could lend itself to beautiful illustrations.  "Black Dog" is a story associated with Gaiman's full-length work American Gods, and is the second story released along those lines--I haven't read the first, but didn't feel it was necessary to understand this one.  Knowledge of American Gods, however, would be very useful.

Overall, I think if you like Gaiman's work, this is quite good.  Some of the pieces are very short, only a few pages, but the longer works help to bulk it up and are evenly-spaced enough to keep the book moving forward pas what could be considered weaker pieces.  Still, I like Gaiman's long-form better than his short, and can't wait until he comes out with another full-length novel.

3.5 stars out of 5.

The Frangipani Hotel - Violet Kupersmith

If you've been reading this blog somewhat regularly, you might have noticed I've struggled with short stories recently.  I've gone through a slew of collections that left me feeling like I just wasn't getting it, and I often pondered just giving up on short-form literature entirely.  But then I'd remember several collections that I really, really liked (The Civilized World, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, and The Thing Around Your Neck immediately come to mind) so I persisted.  I kept reading those collections, even though they left me so frustrated.  And now, now it has all paid off, because I found another collection that I really, really enjoyed.

The Frangipani Hotel reminded me a great deal of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us.  The latter has supernatural or paranormal occurrences spattered throughout--nothing massive, but just enough to rise the hairs on the back of the characters' necks and let you know that not everything is quite what it seems, that there are monsters lurking under the bed and on every street corner.  As one character says, "Our muddy patch of the world was already shadowy and blood-soaked and spirit-friendly long before the Americans got here.  There's ancient and ugly things waiting to harm you in that darkness.  Yes, of course they're there in daylight, to--they're just harder to spot" (80).

Let me be clear: these are not scary stories.  They will not have you checking under the bed and booby-trapping your closet door before you go to sleep.  However, they are creepy because they show the skewed perceptions people can have of the world around them, and how something that seems like it's one thing can very easily be something completely different.  I really loved that aspect.  Some of them are creepier than others; "The Frangipani Hotel" and "Little Brother" were definitely a little more out-there than "Guests," for example.  In "The Frangipani Hotel," a strange girl shows up who isn't officially staying at the hotel, and she's perpetually thirsty--and possibly far older than she seems.  In "Little Brother," a man agrees to give a ride to a dying boy, only to be warned by a nurse not to talk to the passenger--and if he must talk, don't tell the boy his name.  Both of these contained distinct notes of menace that were largely absent in "Guests," where the strangest things that happen are a coincidence with a cat and a messed-up manicure.  But story collections always vary in quality, and the misses here weren't total flops.  They didn't really impact my enjoyment of the collection as a whole.

Oh, one more thing--this collection is focused around Vietnam.  Some of the stories take place there, some of them take place in the US but focus on characters who are Vietnamese or Vietnamese-American.  I don't really know anything about Vietnamese mythology, so I have no authority on the subject of whether or not these have any real "authenticity" about them, but I really enjoyed them.  They have a good feel to them, and they don't require a lot of outside knowledge in order to be understood.  They didn't leave me feeling stupid or like I didn't get it.  They're not meant to be "brainy," which I feel is a common problem with short stories--the authors feel like they have to prove something, and the stories come off pretentious as a result.  That wasn't the case here.  These were just good, and accessible to the average reader.  They don't require an entire college literature course to break them down and understand them.  Some of them--most of them, really--leave the climactic action off the page, after the end of the story, leaving you to imagine the menaces waiting after the words end.  That's probably a good stylistic choice--what's scarier than your own imagination, after all?

I highly recommend this one.  The stories are creepy but not scary, and very easy to read.  I devoured this just like Thuy devoured her banh mi.

4 stars out of 5.

American Innovations - Rivka Galchen

This is an odd book.  Collections of short stories tend to be odd in some sort of way, but this one is particularly odd, partly because of the nature of the stories and party because of the unevenness of the collection.  Some of the stories have a hint of the possible paranormal about them; in one, a woman watches her furniture walk away on its own.  Some of them seem to lack any real point or driving motive, such as the one that's basically just an accounting of how a mother and daughter bought and sold things.  Some are first person, some are third.  Some have narrators that may or may not be unreliable, leaving me with the vague, nagging sense that all the narrators might be unreliable and Galchen was just having a giggle at my expense.  It's not that great of a feeling.  There's an overall feeling in these stories that something is just off, for a reason that you can't quite put your finger on, and some of the title/story combinations made me feel like I was missing something massive, though even after a good deal of reflection I can't figure out what that missing aspect was.  The sense of disconnection that the main characters of the stories feel with everyone around them is a recurring theme, but it also makes them somewhat alien to me, the reader.  In the end, I wasn't taken in to a single one of these stories, but was left on the outside looking in, and that's not the best place for a reader to be.

2 stars out of 5.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher - Hilary Mantel

The fact that the title of this book references a fictionalized event (Margaret Thatcher's assassination--also not a reference to October 12th, 1984 assassination attempt) should be a pretty good indicator of the book's contents.  It's short stories, and all of them have this sense of being completely plausible while also being completely fantastic and utterly creepy.

I feel like I'm not a good judge of short stories.  I know I could never write one; they take a tremendous amount of restraint to do properly, and that's something I seem to lack when it comes to writing.  Mantel, however, has this quality in spades.  She knows exactly how much to reveal in each tale and how much to leave lurking in the shadows, where you can almost but not quite get a glimpse of it.  The topics covered in this collection are broad, from matters of extramarital affairs to dealings with the supernatural to just plain tragedies that are left so that they'll almost give you nightmares.  The endings are, in more than one case, menacing, and the writing style is so matter-of-fact that it's hard to believe that the world could be any other way.

I really enjoyed this, particularly the "Winter Break" story (so creepy) and the titular "The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher," because even though I knew the attempted assassination was fictional, Mantel presented it so elegantly that I felt an urge to look up Thatcher and make sure I hadn't missed something (I don't think I did).  However, one thing I feel is that short stories are often rife with dimensions and symbolism that require deep study, and on a few of these ("Commas") I definitely felt like there was something I missed in reading.  I think several of these stories could bear with a deeper examination, but quite frankly I'm not the right person to do that.  I think this could make a wonderful book for a literature class, though--one that could provide excellent curriculum while also being an entertaining read for the students.  The slight touches of supernatural are enough to make one think, "But what if...?" while not straying into outright realms of fantasy, and the more menacing aspects of the stories (cloven hoofs and grubby hands come to mind immediately) send shivers down the spine.  Overall, I really enjoyed this, and I might look into picking up one of Mantel's novels (which are, I'm told, quite different) once I work through some of the other volumes currently in my possession.

4 out of 5 stars.

The Color Master - Aimee Bender

Like most story collections, The Color Master varies wildly in quality from one story to another.  The book is loosely divided into parts, which start out more "realistic" and get more "fantastic" as the book goes on, though all of them blend elements of reality and fantasy, whether it's a traditional swords-and-sorcery type of fantasy or a more modern sexual type of fantasy, or just an element of surrealism.  The stories cover everything from a woman convincing two of her male friends to have sex with each other to a man who thinks he's a Nazi but isn't to more fairytale-like stories including ogres and dresses the color of the moon.

That last one, the story with the dress the color of the moon, is the source of the book's title.  "The Color Master" was definitely one of the strongest stories in the book, telling the tale of the people who made the famous dresses of the fairytale "Donkeyskin."  It captures doubt, fear, anger, and grief while mixing in a somewhat comic, disorganized work environment.

Some of the stories, on the other hand, just didn't make much sense to me.  I wasn't sure what to think of "Appleless," the first story in the collection, which at first appears to be about a girl who doesn't like apples but might actually be about murder or rape or both; I'm not entirely sure.  This not-being-sure-what-to-think spanned much of the book for me.  In most of the stories, I felt like I was just missing the point, which left an unpleasant feeling of disappointment and confusion--not what I'm looking for out of pleasure reading.  Maybe I'm just not cut out for the majority of Bender's short stories.  Still, if surrealism is something you're interested in, this would probably be a good read.  If you're not very good at interpreting tons of layers of narrative though (like I'm apparently not) this might not be the book for you.