Holly Black, The Poison Eaters and Other Stories (Big Mouth House, 2010)
One of the aspects to Holly Black's fiction which has always intrigued me is her ability to use her depictions of the faerie world in novels such as Tithe and Valiant, to provide a parallel for the darker aspects of our own contemporary culture, including social alienation, drug and alcohol abuse, and the struggles many people, especially young people, must undergo in order to just survive.
In The Poison Eaters and Other Stories, Black's first collection of short stories, readers get the opportunity to find Black branching out with new settings, from a science fiction future where vampires are kept in glittering ghettoes, to fairy tales in which humans are more monstrous than the monsters which they create.
In the first -- and in my mind the standout -- of a number of strong stories in the collection, "The Coldest Girl in Coldtown," a teenage girl named Matilda uses alcohol to keep her vampiric thirst in check. Her attempt to save herself from an eternity of existence as a vampire is shaken when she is asked to help save a friend's sister. While this story uses the cultural image of the vampire to question how far someone will go to be one of the beautiful people, along the way it also disrupts our cultural fascination with a creature which is most notable for its insatiable appetite, an appetite which can only be fulfilled through the lives of other human beings. As Black's story makes clear, the only thing with a more insatiable and destructive appetite than a vampire is the cultural craving for celebrity, for sensation, for images of inhumanly beautiful people who are willing to sacrifice everything human in themselves just to be the object of the camera's eye.
"A Reversal of Fortune" is a Faust tale in which the protagonist is a teenage girl who, desperate to save her dying pet, uses her own special kinds of knowledge to beat the Devil at his own game.
"The Night Market" and "The Coat of Stars" are two more stories in which seemingly disempowered people fight apparently hopeless battles to save someone they love, the theme which runs through a significant number of the stories in this collection. A couple of the stories portray young people who are on their way to becoming lost souls, and a number of these stories seem to imply that the moment we stop trying to help save others is the moment we ourselves become lost.
"The Dog King" is an Angela Carteresque fairy tale in which a werewolf kept as a pet by a king discovers his true nature, while "Paper Cuts Scissors" is reminiscent of a Joan Aiken or Kelly Link story in which a library sciences graduate student attempts to find his former girlfriend. This last story is another favorite, especially if one is the sort of person who has entire parts of the Dewey Decimal System memorized (not that I know anyone like this).
In "The Poison Eaters," a story reminiscent of Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter," a girl conceived of as a weapon for revenge attempts to shape her own destiny, while in "The Land of Heart's Desire" (set in the world of Tithe and Valiant), two characters, one mortal and one fey, attempt to prevent their belief that they are destined to be unhappy forever from poisoning their romantic relationships.
The Poison Eaters and Other Stories is an elegant and eloquent collection of dark fantasy and fairy tales that epitomizes some of the best writing those forms have to offer.
The Poison Eaters and Other Stories can be ordered online through Big Mouth House, an imprint of Small Beer Press, and also through other online bookstores such as Amazon.
