Readers

Outsiders, edited by Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick;

The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy, edited by Mike Ashley.

As I did last year with another of Ashley's anthologies, I note that the "Mammoth" book is indeed very large, and it is predominantly composed of reprints. But it does include 9 originals, more than 50,000 words of fiction, so it's certainly a significant source of new stuff.

Subtotals: 65 stories (4 novellas, 23 novelettes, 38 short stories (no short-shorts)), about 485,000 words of new fiction.

None of these books can be called outstanding, unfortunately. Fantastic Companions is apparently aimed at the YA market (and perhaps at school libraries). But to my mind it resembled nothing so much as a fairly typical DAW theme anthology. Lords of Swords promises pretty much pure Sword and Sorcery, and delivers same, but is quite uneven. Winter Moon is three longish novellas about magical influences of the moon, the best only decent, the worst very bad indeed. Outsiders is a somewhat horror-oriented collection, not bad really but never brilliant. And the new stories in The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy are enjoyable enough but again never brilliant.

Three of the novellas are from Winter Moon, which includes a bad novella from Mercedes Lackey, a mediocre novella from C. E. Murphy, and a pretty good but not great novella from Tanith Lee ("The Heart of the Moon", about a warrior who must atone for her treatment of her lover and her best friend after she caught them in flagrante, and who travels to a mysterious island, and perhaps to the moon, to do so). The other novella was Sarah Jane Elliott's "Blood Ties", which I found fairly interesting, indeed promising, but not quite a successful work in itself. It's about a rebellious young woman and her attempts to free a griffin cruelly imprisoned by her basically decent but misguided father. Much of it intrigued me enough to think that Elliott may eventually do pretty strong work, but this particular story doesn't realize its promise.

There were some fine novelettes. The best story from Lords of Swords is Tanith Lee's "The Woman in Scarlet", about a warrior and his sentient, female, unfaithful sword. From the same book I also quite liked Howard Andrew Jones's "Line of Blood". From Fantastic Companions, Ruth Nestvold's "Dragon Time" is rather nice, about a clockmaker's daughter and the Dragon King and Dragon Queen and the curious nature of time in their small milieu. Outsiders has another good Tanith Lee piece, a novel excerpt called "Scarabesque", as well as a John Shirley story, "Miss Singularity", that starts out strong (about a girl who decides to commit suicide) but flubs it with a stale resolution. And from the Mammoth Book, I liked Damien Broderick's "The Kaluza-Klein Caper", revised from a 1988 novel so probably not really new enough to count as a 2005 story. I also enjoyed Tom Holt's contribution, "Wrong Planet".

Of the short stories, my favorites were from Outsiders: Melanie Tem's "The Country of the Blind", about a group of homeless who band together at a price -- they must blind themselves; and a couple of non-fantastical pieces: Poppy Z. Brite's "The Working Slob's Prayer" (about a New Orleans restaurant and its odd characters) and Jack Ketchum's "Lighten Up", an anti-anti-smoking piece, as well as stories from Steve Rasnic Tem, Léa Silhol, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Kathe Koja. From Fantastic Companions, John C. Bunnell's "Dances With Coyotes" was rather nice, as was Jay Lake's "Eggs for Dinner". Almost all the better work in Lords of Swords was novelette length -- the best shorter piece may have been David Felts's "The King's General", while the best shorter piece in the Mammoth Book was probably Adam Roberts's "Pest Control".