Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (editors), Best American Fantasy 2008 (Prime, 2008)
One of the reasons fantasy is such a popular and fertile genre is the way magic can apply to anything -- from the ostentatious quests for rings and crystals of power to the subtle appeal of the uncanny. This explains how fantasy can sometimes slip into that vague and ill-defined territory of writing known as "literature" through the backdoor and steal some acclaim for itself that avoids the oft-derided "taint" of "genre writing."
That being said, looking at the entries in the anthology Best American Fantasy 2008, one may notice that many of these tales (as well as their authors' other works) don't originate in the fantasy market. While a few are published and recognized by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, the World Fantasy Awards, Hugos, and Nebulas, still more came from the likes of Harper's and McSweeney's. And, in turn, many of these stories feel like literature playing at being fantasy, rather than a true fantasy story in which mystery and the unknown truly influence the world.
That being said, the anthology starts fairly well. The first tale in the anthology comes from Erik Amundsen, called "Bufo Rex," a darkly funny fairy tale about a wily giant toad. Following this is Bruce Holland Rogers' "The Seven Deadly Hotels," an engaging, witty, and marvellously inventive story about travellers who spend the night in hotels that reveal themselves to be the embodiment of one of the seven deadly sins. Watch out for the Envy hotel -- it's a doozy.
The anthology starts heading south with Miranda Mellis' "The Revisionist." The story (originally published in Harper's) concerns a woman who observes the world's outlandish and overblown descent into chaos while writing official government reports stating that everything is fine. Her revisions actually have no effect on the world around her -- the story's glum and unsubtle political point about how blissful ignorance may not be so blissful is hammered home with ham-handed blows.
Thankfully, after that comes Kage Baker's palate-cleansing "The Ruby Incomparable," a wry account of how the power-hungry daughter of two formidable elemental forces essentially takes a very long route to come around to a very simple conclusion. This is the way to tell a realistic human story through fantastic means. The story's playful jibes with fantasy tropes might appeal to fans of Beagle's The Last Unicorn or Gaiman's Stardust.
The anthology see-saws back with Aimee Bender's insufferably pretentious "Interval." Synopses are difficult to write when the subject matter has little cohesive plot -- from what I can gather, the protagonist attending a sculpture class is denied clay and ordered to sculpt using the "sounds of the room." Instead, he daydreams about dating the sculpture model and impregnating her with sculptures of his family. Whether this is a confused metaphor about the artistic creative process or a drippy narrative of a man's attempt to negate loneliness with art is beyond my ability to determine.
"Memoir of a Deer Woman," by M. Rickert, follows, a moving story about a married couple who lose the ability to communicate, in more ways than the obvious, when the wife begins to turn into a deer. During the stages of her transformation she attempts to explain the process to her husband verbally, physically, and through writing her memoir, before they lose all contact for good.
Christian Moody's "In the Middle of the Woods," about a boy whose father withdraws from life to create unsettlingly lifelike and aggressive birds out of broken appliances, is a bit of an odd duck, if you'll pardon the pun. The protagonist is a pretty ordinary teenager, despite the surreal and uncanny downward spiral his family takes, and serves as the very real beating heart beneath the vague, dark magic of the piece.
Rick Moody (no relation?) creates a relatively pleasant farce with "Story With Advice II: Back from the Dead." In this interesting take on the ghost story, a murdered advice columnist finds himself somehow capable of continuing his column from beyond the grave, only now he must respond to insipid questions about the afterlife, even as he is still unsure of the exact parameters of his undead state.
"Logorrhea," by Michelle Richmond, is one of my favourites from this collection. A woman cursed with the titular disorder (an inability to shut up) finds herself cured of her overactive tongue when she falls in love with a man born with razor-sharp scales all over his body. However, her new taste for silence prevents her from truly expressing the reason for her love for the lizard man, particularly when he finds several "cures" for the condition she finds so beautiful.
After this comes the odd "Ave Maria," by Micaela Morrissette. The story meanders along a good pace, with the plot mainly concerning some bizarre human/bird/gorilla hybrid in medieval France who becomes somewhat civilized by the attention (a great deal of it religious) that people pay to her. Morrissette writes with beautiful language that frequently dips into frustratingly opaque symbolism without much transition, making for an often slow and difficult read to figure out what's going on.
"Chainsaw on Hand," by Deborah Coates, has only a very slight fantastical element in it: the protagonist's ex-husband believes he can see fairies. Or trolls, depending on his mood. However, no trolls or fairies show up in this story, which seems more about the reasons people willingly weather the harsh South Dakota winters, and the various dreams and excuses they dream up to comfort themselves, than anything genuinely otherworldly.
Peter S Beagle follows up with a fluffy, yet rich soufflé of a story: "The Last and Only, or, Mr Moscowitz Becomes French." While the titular character necessarily plays a large role as he transforms into a Frenchman (in this story, a much more physiological and fantastical occurrence than simply learning the language on tape), the emotional centre of the story lies with his wife who struggles to keep up with his progress. Beautiful, yet heartbreaking.
"Minus, His Heart," by Jedediah Berry, is another full-out weird tale that somehow remains somewhat charming because it defiantly refuses all attempts to adhere to realism. Minus, the titular character, is a man whose heart is a tape-deck, whose tape has been stolen by a petty thief. Catching up to the thief, Minus and the boy travel through a mind-bogglingly bizarre world of children who speak like Shakespearean characters and playgrounds that create babies.
Following this is "Abroad," by Judy Budnitz, which, like "Interval," is composed of a lot of tedious and unconventionally worded description that tries to pass itself off as fantasy. The basic plot is a woman who travels to an exotic location and immediately decides she doesn't like the people, language, or culture -- or her lover, who's a bit of a jerk and invites strange (read: foreign, not magical) people to their hotel room. The woman's unpleasantness says a lot about North American xenophobia, but other than some unsettling characters, nothing happens beyond the realm of the real.
Matt Bell risks a lawsuit from Nintendo with "Mario's Three Lives," a slyly inventive story of Mario (the red jumpsuited plumber of SuperMario fame), told from his point of view as he gorges on mushrooms and plunders coins, all the while trembling with existential angst that the next time he fails, "God" (the kid mashing the GameBoy buttons) might not choose the "Continue" option. While quite funny, I'm not sure how people unfamiliar with videogames might enjoy this story.
David Hollander's "The Naming of the Islands" is another intriguing tale, a mixture of Captain Cook and an acid trip, about a ship's log of a craft crewed by convicts exploring an archipelago of mysterious, magical, and often hostile islands. There seems to be no end to these islands, and sickness and despair gradually whittle down the crew's numbers.
I found "The Drowned Life" by Jeffrey Ford to be deeply unsettling -- in a good way. An insurance clerk with bills to pay and children to raise is consumed by stress and falls into a world of literalized metaphor. Giving up on life, he literally "goes under" and ends up in a creepy underwater world of lost souls who, for some reason or other, gave up trying to keep up with family crises and existential angst. As he braves the depths, he's also chased by an angry shark called Financial Ruin. An evocative and horrifying story.
"How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth" by Rachel Swirsky is a colourful tongue-in-cheek "those darn humans" story that shows how even when swaddled in myth and magic, humanity, no matter how downtrodden, always manages to rise to the occasion and engage in a self-destructive killing spree that never quite seems to destroy them completely. While light, the story is finely constructed and quite entertaining.
The anthology's final entry, Kelly Link's "Light," is more difficult to grasp. Our protagonist lives in a human universe that exists side-by-side with other "pocket universes" that can be visited or exploited on a whim. She also is gifted with two shadows, one of which eventually coalesced into her twin brother Alan. She also takes care of "sleepers" -- people who, for some reason or another, fall into a timeless sleep from which nothing can wake them. While vibrantly and creatively detailed, "Light" had so many plot points that remained unconnected and unresolved, it seemed more like the uncompleted first chapter of a novel than a stand-alone short fiction piece.
Best American Fantasy 2008 did not impress me overmuch. A few stories genuinely sparkled ("Logorrhea," "The Seven Deadly Hotels," "The Ruby Incomparable"), others were unbearable examples of thinly-veiled literary posturing ("Interval," "Abroad," "The Revisionist"), and one seemed to be an interesting general fiction piece that wandered into the wrong party ("Chainsaw on Hand"). For the most part, the rest of the stories merit varying degrees of "pleasant enough," about two hundred pages of literary muddle enjoyed mostly because the simple act of reading is enjoyable. Other than a few diamonds in the rough, this supposedly best-of anthology is quickly disposed of and even more swiftly forgotten.
