Saturday, March 03, 2007

Year's Best Fantasy and Horror for 1995 (incomplete)

Anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Kindling.

I am not going to make a habit of reviewing these, but I wanted to mention them because anthologies are a good way to find new authors without having to read huge books by them. Reading this prompted me to finally check out some of Nina Kiriki Hoffman's books, and introduced me to some other authors I hadn't read before.

This book becomes much more tractable when you skip the 90 pages of introductory material and all the horror stories (distinguished by the initials E.D. in the little editor's note describing the story), as I did for the most part.

Most of the fantasy stories in here are good. I especially liked Home for Christmas, The Printer's Daughter (wow), and the Princess/Swan poems, but see previous sentence. I skipped most of Paper Lantern. The Granddaughter is an amusing take on Little Red Riding Hood, somewhat in the line of the movie Hoodwinked.

This is part of a huge, yearly series of anthologies, which I doubt I will mention further, but I'm sure are worth checking out (of a library) for the reasons above.

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