books

Theodora Goss

Books: Fantasy | Short Stories

Anthologies

Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixteenth Edition (2003), The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection (2004), Year's Best Fantasy 5 (2005), The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales (2007), People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy (2010), Happily Ever After (2011), The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination: Original Short Fiction for the Modern Evil Genius (2013), Queen Victoria's Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy (2013)

Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixteenth Edition (2003) edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling

Theodora Goss - The Rose in Twelve Petals

Published by St. Martin's Griffin

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection (2004) edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling

Theodora Goss - Lily, with Clouds

Published by St. Martin's Griffin

Year's Best Fantasy 5 (2005) edited by David G. Hartwell &  Kathryn Cramer

Year's Best Fantasy 5

Publisher: Harper Voyager

The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales (2007) edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling

I love short stories. Aside from collections by Charles de Lint, I best love anthologies by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling best. Their books are like comfort food, and I save them up for when I'm sick or feeling low.

In the same vein as The Green Man and The Faerie Reel, Datlow and Windling have this time collected stories about tricksters, and they've got some of my favorite authors in this collection: Charles de Lint, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Ellen Kushner. As usual, they manage to collect stories by some of my favorite story tellers.

If like short story collections, or trickster tales, then you will want to read The Coyote Road. It has stories from many of my favorite writers, and as with all their collections, I was delighted to discover new authors for whom I'll be on the lookout.

Published by Viking

Rating: 9/10

People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy (2010) edited by Peter S. Beagle & Shawn Wallace

People of the Book

Publisher: Prime Books

Happily Ever After (2011) edited by John Klima

Happily Ever After

Not sure how I missed this when I first came out, but this anthology is full of things I love: authors whose books I love, stories based on folk and fairy tales–lovely!

The only thing I didn't like, is I wish the anthology hadn't ended on such a dark and depressing story.

Mind you, the dark and depressing stories were good–very good–but these tales ran very true to the original stories, with a not insignificant amount of rape and incest and general horribleness. Just like the original tales.

But there's also a good amount of humor as well, and I just wished the collection had ended with one of the funnier stories.

Please note, as previously mentioned, the stories have rape and incest and lots and lots of sex in addition to evil stepmothers and other such killers.

There were also a fair number of very dark and very depressing tales that were very good, but that I didn't enjoy at all.

Published by Night Shade Books

Rating: 8/10

The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination: Original Short Fiction for the Modern Evil Genius (2013) edited by John Joseph Adams

mad-scientists-guide-to-world-domination

This is the third anthology I've read by John Joseph Adams, and I must say that he has a good rack record for creating anthologies with stories I really like. He also has a good mix of stories, some of which I am guaranteed not to like, but that's okay, because it's good to read stuff I don't normally read, and if I really don't like a story, I can always skip on to the next (even though I rarely do that).

The stories I liked best in this anthology were the straight-up cackling Evil Overlord sort (you know that list, right?), because they were funny. The ones I liked least tended to be the more serious ones, because, well, evil in its true form exists in the world, and it's generally funny at all.

Theodora Goss's story "The Mad Scientist's Daughter" is the tale of the daughters of famous madmen: Dr Frankenstein, Dr Moreau, Dr Jekyll, etc. They live together because, as the author notes, "Science does not pay well; mad science pays even worse."

Aside from the anthology ending on several depressing notes, this was all-in-all a varied and very good collection of stories, with something for everyone. After all, the stories I disliked were not bad, they were just not my type of story.

Published by Tor Books

Rating: 8/10

Queen Victoria's Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy (2013) edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling

queen-victorias-book-of-spells

I love anthologies and I love historical fiction. So this should have been an automatic win for me.

Instead it was a two-plus year slog that I finally forced myself to finish.

Estella Saves the Village by Theodora Goss. Imagine the characters from your favorite Vistorian novels all gathered together in one town.

Published by Tor