The Faery Reel

The Faery Reel edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling

Any time I see a fantasy anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, I’ll often as not pick it up, because I know that it’s going to be good. Usually very good. This volume however, has the added bonus of poems by both Charles de Lint and Neil Gaiman.

Needless to say I snatched it up in hardback when I came across it.

These faery tales are based not upon the fairies of Disney but upon the faery of folktales. As they say in the introduction:

In this book about our good neighbors, we’ve asked a number of our favorite writers to travel into the Twilight Realm (an ancient name for the land of Faerie) and to bring back stories of faeries and the hapless mortals who cross their path. “No butterfly-winged sprites,” we pleaded. “Read the old folktales, journey farther afield, find some of the less explored paths through the Realm.

It would be hard for me not to love this book.

And I wasn’t let down. Tengu Mountain by Gregory Frost was perfect. It reminded me of any number of Japanese folktales without actually being any one of them.

Catnyp by Delia Sherman I quite liked; it reminded me a bit of a Charles de Lint story. In Catnyp, Faerie exists parallel to our world, and includes a New York Public Library that reminds me a bit of Terry Pratchett’s library, only without the L-Space.

The Price of Glamour by Steve Berman was the type of tale I like best–not set in this time, and not really set in this reality. I don’t have anything against fantasy set in our time and our reality (I do love Charles de Lint after all!) It’s just that for me tales set in other realities are more of an escape. And often I really want to escape from this reality.

Bruce Glassco’s Never Never is fantastic. I’d never thought about how Hook felt about the part he had to play in Never Never land before, and why he was so bitter about it.

One of my favorite stories was The Dream Eaters by A.M. Dellamonica. Part faerie tale, part hard boiled detective tale, it combines my favorite types of stories. I was, however, a little confused by her faerie and how time ran there.

All in all an excellent anthology. But I hardly expected anything less.

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