***I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you Netgalley and Subterranean Press!***

As with all short story collections that I read, I prefer to review them by the story. Inevitably I will love some of them and not care for others and this collection was no different. I am a big fan of the author but some of these stories were a miss. I also noticed that there were some formatting issues with the ARC, which meant that sometimes I didn’t get the complete story. On the whole, this collection was a solid four stars with a lot more hits than misses.

Laughter at the Academy: 2 stars. I am not sure if it was the formatting issue or if the story was really supposed to be that disjointed. We got a little snippet of something “official” about the disorder in question, and then we would jump into a scene, right in the middle of a sentence. A scene that is totally unconnected from the previous scene. If that if how it was supposed to be, I didn’t like it. The snippets were good, but I never felt I got a full story.

Lost: 5 stars. This was a very short story but wow it packed a wallop. It was inventive and whimsical. It was riveting and profound. It was fantastic.

The Tolling of Pavlov’s Bells: 5 stars. This is probably one of the more twisted stories I’ve read in quite a long while. It carries very heavy themes in complacency as a species, being too convinced of our own individual superiority to listen to people superior in knowledge than us. The desire for things to be the same and to be easy than to listen to harsh lessons. It was profound and deeply, deeply twisted.

Uncle Sam: 2 stars. The formatting issue was present here too, the story started mid sentence and I could tell there was more to it that I didn’t get. I didn’t really like this one. The story was slightly interesting but I didn’t really invest in the narrative for some reason. It was a bit obvious where it was going and the political assumptions in it were rather annoying. For example, “well obviously, even though many people think X thing, we all know that Y is true.” Well no, Y isn’t objectively true in the real world. If it’s objectively true in this world then fine, or if it’s true to those people then fine, but telling me that it’s true without more context was annoying. The ending was obvious, which also was irritating.

Crystal Halloway and the Forgotten Passage: 3 stars. This story was okay. I would have liked a tiny bit more history on the story. I know it’s a short story but just thrusting someone into a fantasy world with no warning is a bit jarring, give me something to explain the things that are going on. The ending was good, I liked the conclusion a lot. Overall, it was fine but not as good as some of the others.

Emeralds to Emeralds, Dust to Dust: 4 stars. I love the land of Oz and stories about Dorothy’s adventures. This was definitely a darker story but I loved it. There wasn’t too much action, which disappointed me a little but the world introduced there was amazing.

Homecoming: 2 stars. I can honestly say I remember nothing about this story, even though I took notes. That says something I think.

Frontier ABCs: 4 stars. I can honestly say that I had no idea where this was going and it was a delightful little ride to find out.

We are all Misfit Toys in the Aftermath of the Velveteen War: 5 stars. Holy crap this story threw me for a loop. I had to take a break from the book for a day or two because it just sent me reeling. It’s something so profound that I could imagine happening in our world. I have often said, “How do you prepare the world for a child’s toy saying they don’t want to be turned off because they are scared of the dark?” I love the complexities offered to humanity by AI and this story explored that beautifully.

The Lambs: 2 stars. Another exploration of AI and its uses in humanity but there was a problem here. I just didn’t buy it. I did not buy that this would be a reasonable alternative to the way things are right now. As a parent, I can’t imagine anyone seeing the technology presented and thinking “Yes, that’s a good idea for handling unruly, bully children”. And so, I didn’t enjoy the story because I couldn’t buy the premise.

Each to Each: 4 stars. Not too much to say about this one in particular other than it was really great.

Bring About the Halloween Eternal: 5 stars. Part of good sci-fi is using new formats to tell a story. This one used the backdrop of a GoFundMe project to tell the story and I loved that idea. It was playful, unique and wonderfully constructed.

Office Memos: 4 stars. I really loved this one because it takes the form of a bunch of company emails to narrate the story. Having been on the receiving end of many such mundane office emails I found it thoroughly enjoyable.

Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare: 3 stars. This one was okay. It had some formatting issues at the beginning, so I missed out on the beginning of the story. It was a solid story, I just didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as the others.

Driving Jenny Home: 5 stars. This particular story broke my heart. I cried all over my Nook. The sadness was palpable, the conclusion inevitable and all I could think at the end of it was “I’d do the same thing for the person I loved.”

There is no Place for Sorrow in the Kingdom of the Cold: 5 stars. I can honestly say I’ve never read a retelling of Pandora’s Box, so this was a first and it hit the nail on the head. I loved every word and wanted the story to be longer.

In Skeleton Leaves: 4 stars. Speaking of retellings, Peter Pan anyone? This was also wonderful. I felt so sad for the characters and the ending I did not see coming, though I probably should have I was just too wrapped up in Wendy’s narrative to see it.

Please Accept My Most Profound Apologies: 5 stars. I have to say, I really love stories that are narrated as a letter from the bad guy, explaining themselves to the unfortunate sap who finds their manuscript before the end of the world. This was great and made my heart race in anticipation.

Threnody for Little Girl, With Tuna, at the End of the World: 3 stars. This one was an interesting concept and I liked the backdrop of the Monterey Bay Aquarium since it’s also one of my favorite places on earth. But in the end it was a little bland.

From A to Z in the Book of Changes: 3 stars. I liked this one, but it was just too disjointed for me. It seemed like unconnected threads that never came together to form a whole.

#connollyhouse #weshouldntbehere: 5 stars. I said earlier I loved playing with new mediums, this was a horror story told through someone’s Twitter timeline. I really liked that idea but wasn’t sure how effective it would be. Oh my God was it effective. It literally made my jump and feel uneasy sitting in my living room and continuing reading. It was superb. Probably the best one in the book.

Down, Deep Down, Below the Waves: 4 stars. We ended the book with the formatting cutting off a page or so from the beginning of this final story. It was deliciously twisted and well told.

This review can also be found at Carole's Random Life in Books.

I liked this book even if it wasn't my favorite. I felt like I was reading this book forever. That has more to do with how I tend to read short story collections than the writing contained in these stories. A collection like this one that contains over 20 stories has a lot of natural stopping points and I do tend to stop after finishing a story. I do think that this was a great way to see how Seanan McGuire's versatility.

This collection had a little bit of everything. If you are looking for a mermaid story, you will find it. A story about a little girl and the world's last tuna? It is here. There is a haunted house story, a story set in Neverland and another in Oz. There is even a story about a war with toys and another about a very special dollmaker. The writing was as varied as the stories. There was a story that was writing as a series of tweets, another as a series of office memos, and another as a crowdfunding proposal.

As is the case with most short story collections, I found myself enjoying some stories a lot more than others. There were some stories that I didn't care for much at all, some I loved, some I thought were okay, and a few that just confused me. I am easily confused so that doesn't really mean much.

I would recommend this book. I think that this was an overall enjoyable collection with some pretty outstanding stories. I haven't read a lot of Seanan McGuire's work but I do plan to read more in the near future.

I received a digital review copy of this book from Subterranean Press via NetGalley.

Initial Thoughts
I finally finished this book. I feel like I have been reading it forever but I think that is due to the fact that I find short story collections really easy to set aside after finishing a story. This book has over 20 stories so that I a lot of putting the book down. I liked some of the stories a whole lot, some were okay, some I didn't care for, and some just confused me. Of course, I am easily confused so that may not mean anything. All in all, I am glad that I read this one.

I've read two more stories from the collection.

"Lost"

Sometimes it's the quiet, slight stories that slip beneath my defences and take up permanent residence in my imagination. "Lost" is one of them. 

It's a short and fairly simple tale, told as a shared recollection of a grown man remembering his youth and the opportunity he lost but that he has not been able to forget. This is a story that twists the threads of the Pied Piper and Peter Pan into something new and tantalizing.  

The simplicity of the story is deceptive. The narrative is really a carrier, a disease vector hosting a series of questions and possibilities that colonised my imagination. At the heart of this story lies a question about the nature of belief, the kind of belief that only children can fully embrace and even then, not all children have the capacity fully to commit themselves to the truth of an idea. What if the passionate belief of children made the things that they believe in true? Would we adults allow ourselves to see and accept that truth?

It's a fascinating idea. One of the attributes that distinguishes the adult from the child is the ability of the adult to distinguish between facts and stories. Yet what if the stories hold more truth than the facts?

I found myself wondering if I was one of the children who would have believed or one who would have stepped back? Whether I am an adult who is open to seeing what the children see or if my grasp on reality s so tight and so desperate that new truths are too risky to reach for.

 

 

"The Tolling Of Pavlov's Bells"

The style of this story is an almost playful depiction of the mad scientist as a threat to life on earth. Its content is about as playful as a game of Russian Roulette. The dissonance between content and style makes the story quite creepy.

The storytelling is matter-of-fact but non-linear. This allows the horror of what is happening to emerge slowly, like the gradual spread of a rash.  

The science content of the story is distressingly plausible. This would not be so hard to do.

Except who would do this? Perhaps the most frightening thing about this story is that the scientist planning and perpetrating this atrocity is educated, rational and clear-sighted, making her a Mad Scientist who is mad only in the way that a sniper in a tower, aiming with care and shooting with precision, is mad.

The behaviour of humans en masse that is shown here, their reaction to the bells the scientist rings, is also depressingly plausible. As the climate change debate shows, we deny science that tells us unpalatable things. As the success of the anti-vaxer movement the Russians have used social media to create shows, our response to poorly understood threats is driven more by fear than by rational thought.

I also loved the vein of humour in the story that turns book signings into lethal occasions.

I love the sense of intimacy that I get when an author gets the chance to select the stories of theirs that they love the most and then introduce each one. As Seanan McGuire puts it: 

"This isn't necessarily 'The Best Of,' but it's the pieces that I love most, that I most want to share."

She has picked stories twenty-one stories, all published between 2009 and 2017. They all stand outside the main universes that she normally writes in. This means each on stands or falls on its merits. I like that. 

So far, I've read the first story and it was a blast.

The title already had me smiling:

"Laughter at the Academy:  A Field Study in the Genesis of Schizotypal Creative Genius Personality Disorder (SCGPD)"

As an introvert who has learnt to pass in an extrovert's world and has often had to repress the urge to tear down the noisy, showy, shallow world that they take for granted and expect everyone else to embrace as normal and a replace it with a place where normal people - people like me - can live, I was enthralled by the premise of this story of a society so afraid of creativity and the  creative geniuses /mad scientists who unleash it, that they've classified some kinds of creativity as mental illness and have tried to legislate it out of existence. I think that's a world that deserves to be burnt down. I was cheering for the firestarter all the way through.

I loved the pace of the story, its humour, its lack of remorse and its originality.

I think the quote at the start of the story gives you a good flavour of the mind at work here:

"Upon consideration, we must agree that the greatest danger of the so-called “creative genius” is its flexibility. While the stereotypes of Doctors Frankenstein and Moreau exist for good reason, there is more to the CG-afflicted than mere biology. So much more. The time has come, ladies and gentlemen, for us to redefine what it means to be scientists…and what it means to be afraid."—from the keynote speech delivered to the 10th Annual World Conference on the Prevention of Creative Genius by Professor Elizabeth Midkiff-Cavanaugh (deceased).

 

I love how the first sentence perfectly captures the pompous condescension of mainstream thinkers talking about non-mainstream thinkers and the threat tucked away in the last parenthetic word.