Previous SFF Author: L. Jagi Lamplighter
Margo Lanagan has worked as a kitchen hand and encyclopedia seller, and spent ten years as a freelance book editor. Her story collection Red Spikes was a Publishers Weekly Best Book and a Horn Book Fanfare, and Black Juice was a Printz Honor Book. She lives in Sydney, Australia.
In the collection White Time, Margo Lanagan writes with a clear, distinctive style that doesn’t spoon-feed, but rather challenges the reader in a good way. Her text is multi-layered and works on multiple levels to create interesting speculative fiction stories, some using the tropes of science fiction and some those of fantasy.
White Time features ten stories, and each is unique and different. The eponymous story, “White Time,” is the opener for this publication.
Charles Tan (GUEST)´s rating: 3.5 | Margo Lanagan | Short Fiction, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan
I have a long-time interest in adaptations of fairy tales, and so it surprised me that it took me so long to get through Tender Morsels, a strange and dark retelling of “Snow White and Rose Red.”
The beginning is promising. We meet Liga, mother of the “Snow White” and “Rose Red” characters, as a traumatized teenager. She is sexually abused by her father and later raped by town boys, and Margo Lanagan handles these sensitive topics well. The actual abuse is never described in detail,
Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 2.5 | Margo Lanagan | Stand-Alone, World Fantasy Award | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Nightmare is celebrating its first anniversary with Issue 13, and it starts off with a humdinger of a story by Norman Partridge called “10/31: Bloody Mary.” The use of the date is a deliberate reminder of 9/11, and connotes a catastrophe of equal or greater weight. On 10/31 — this year, next year, last year, we’re never told — all of the monsters became real. Somehow, on Halloween, “werewolves and witches, mummies and zombies, and other nameless things the boy would rather never see” become real. The boy (the protagonist of the story) hides during the day,
Wings of Fire edited by Jonathan Strahan & Marianne S. Jablon
This is probably not the first sentence you’d expect to find in a review of Wings of Fire, an anthology devoted exclusively to dragon stories, but I thought it best to get it out of the way right from the start.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with dragons. They’re just terribly overused, one of those tired genre mainstays that people who typically don’t read a lot of fantasy will expect in a fantasy novel because they were practically unavoidable for a long time.
Stefan Raets´s rating: 4 | Anne McCaffrey, C.J. Cherryh, Charles De_Lint, Elizabeth Bear, George R.R. Martin, Holly Black, James P. Blaylock, Jane Yolen, Jonathan Strahan, Lucius Shepard, Margo Lanagan, Michael Swanwick, Naomi Novik, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Patricia McKillip, Peter S. Beagle, Roger Zelazny, Tanith Lee, Ursula K. Le-Guin | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded is the second steampunk anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, following 2008’s first installment. It contains about twice as many stories as its predecessor, but unlike the first collection the quality is more uneven here, resulting in a less impressive but still fascinating anthology that should please fans of the genre.
While the first anthology only contained one story I was less than happy with, there are at least four or five in Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded that I could have done without.
Zombies vs. Unicorns edited by Holly Black & Justine Larbalestier
Back in 2007, Holly Black and Justine Larabalestier got in an argument about which fiction creature was superior — zombies or unicorns. Spurred on by that debate, they each recruited some of their author friends to write short tales in which they present the storytelling possibilities of the two mythic beasts. With header notes for each story in which they discuss the historical background for the different takes on the creatures, Holly Black heads up Team Unicorn,
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
I haven’t actually read every page of The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, yet I’m giving it my highest recommendation. Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Master and Mistress of Weird, The Weird is 1126 pages long and should really be considered a textbook of weird fiction. It contains 110 carefully chosen stories spanning more than 100 years of weird fiction.
Kat Hooper´s rating: 5 | Abraham Merritt, Caitlín R. Kiernan, China Mieville, Clark Ashton Smith, Clive Barker, Daniel Abraham, Elizabeth Hand, Fritz Leiber, George R.R. Martin, H.P. Lovecraft, Harlan Ellison, Haruki Murakami, Jeff VanderMeer, K.J. Bishop, Kelly Link, Laird Barron, Lisa Tuttle, Liz Williams, Lord Dunsany, Lucius Shepard, M. John Harrison, Margo Lanagan, Mervyn Peake, Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Stephen King, Tanith Lee | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Four edited by Ellen Datlow
Anything Ellen Datlow edits automatically finds a place on my list of books to read. For many years, this included the excellent anthology series The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, which Datlow coedited with Terri Windling. When that series disappeared, much to the dismay of fans of short fiction everywhere, Datlow undertook to publish The Year’s Best Horror, which has been published by the terrific smaller press,
Terry Weyna´s rating: 5 | A.C. Wise, Ellen Datlow, Glen Hirshberg, John Langan, Laird Barron, Margo Lanagan, Peter Straub, Stephen King, Terri Windling | Horror, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror edited by Ellen Datlow
This anthology comes after a similarly titled anthology, also edited by Ellen Datlow, called Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror which came out in March 2010. Datlow also edits an annual anthology of horror fiction (collaborating with other editors on those). It seems then that Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror (which came out in October 2016) is informed by a great deal of knowledge in the field of speculative horror literature.
Skye Walker´s rating: 3.5 | Caitlín R. Kiernan, Ellen Datlow, Garth Nix, Gemma Files, Gene Wolfe, John Langan, Kaaron Warren, Laird Barron, Lisa Tuttle, Margo Lanagan, Richard Kadrey | Horror, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Previous SFF Author: L. Jagi Lamplighter
I can’t believe Publishers Weekly called Mercy a were-coyote! Did they actually read the book or just skim it? This…
It’s been more than 10 years since I first read Bone with my son who just turned 23. I was…
Great minds think alike, Marion! The same thought occurred to me at one point while reading this book....
Interesting! I have to say I had a "Jim and Huck underwater" moment, reading your synopsis.
No doubt about it--I have to read these.