Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson

Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson (2014) Patricia Briggs

As I’ve mentioned previously (and repeatedly) I love short stories.

They’re a hard thing to love sometimes, because there are so many poorly written ones out there. Luckily for me, Patricia Briggs tends to do them well, so I didn’t hesitate to pick up this collection of stories set in Mercy Thompson’s world.

The stories are:
Silver
Fairy Gifts (previously published in Naked City)
Gray (previously published in Home Improvement: Undead Edition)
Seeing Eye (previously published in Strange Brew)
Alpha and Omega (previously published in On the Prowl)
The Star of David (previously published in Wolfsbane and Mistletoe)
Roses in Winter
In Red, with Pearls (previously published in Down These Strange Streets)
Redemption
Hollow
OUTTAKE FROM Silver Borne
OUTTAKE FROM Night Broken

Yes, I do already own all the anthologies in which several of these had been originally published.

Don’t care.

The stories are in chronological order of the Mercy timeline, not the order in which they were originally published.

“Silver” tells the story of how Samuel and Bran were Changed, and how Samuel met Ariana. It’s quite dark, just so you know. It’s still good, and an interesting look at how Samuel and Bran became who they were.

“Fairy Gifts” (previously published in Naked City (2011)) contains none of the characters from the books, but please don’t skip it if you’re only getting this anthology for the Mercy stories (Never mind the fact you’ll be disappointed). It alternates between the past and the present, and is a look at the side of the Wild West few people write about.

I quite adored this brief passage:

“Tap her light, Tommy ,” said one of the men he’d escorted, giving him the traditional farewell wishes of a miner: when forcing a stick of explosive into a drilled hole in the granite, a miner wanted to be very careful tapping it in with his hammer.

It could be taken out, and the story would be fine, but it’s a marvelous piece of ambiance of the time and place.

“Gray” (previously published in Home Improvement: Undead Edition (2011)) is another story that does not have any of the characters in the Mercy and Alpha & Omega stories, but is still one I very much enjoyed. Elyna wants to buy the apartment in which she once lived. As the story unfolds we learn not just about why Elyna no longer lived in that apartment, but a good deal about Elyna herself–and that Elyna is far stronger than she gives herself credit for. This is another very good story.

“Seeing Eye” (previously published in Strange Brew (2009)) I recently re-read in the original anthology. Still really like this story.

“Alpha and Omega” (previously published in On the Prowl (2007)) is start of the Alpha & Omega story. What’s interesting to me is that I had not before realized the overlap between Moon Called and Alpha & Omega. Because I read this when I was well into the Mercy Thompson series, I’d forgotten the details of the events and hadn’t linked them together (or placed them in the same time-line). In many ways this is a difficult story, since the main character, Anna, has suffered a great deal of abuse (physical and sexual) in the past. Yes, those events are in the past, but they have shaped Anna’s life as a werewolf.

But it’s still a good novella.

“The Star of David ” (previously published in Wolfsbane and Mistletoe (2008)) is another story that features a character from Moon Called. I must have blasted through it the first time I read it, because I missed a LOT of details–or at least completely and totally forgotten them.

He’d thought you had to be bleeding someplace to hurt this badly.

That is a terribly, painfully true statement.

David Christiansen was Changed at the same time as Adam, however, he wasn’t found by a pack until too late, and so has spent decades separated from his daughter. The story isn’t really about him, however, as much as it is about his daughter Stella, a social worker who works with children. This is another story I really liked.

“Roses in Winter” is a story about both Kara–the young girl who was attacked and survived to be changed, and Asil, one of the oldest wolves in the Marrok’s pack, who is waiting for the final loss of control he believes is imminent. I’ve always liked Asil, but I like him even more after this story.

He crooned a child’s lullaby his father had sung to him. It wasn’t Spanish, but African, a Moorish tune his father had learned from his grandmother . Like Asil, it was old and worn, the words in a language that no one, to his knowledge, had spoken for a thousand years.

“In Red, with Pearls” (previously published in Down These Strange Streets (2011)) is a Warren and Kyle story. Warren does a lot silently in the background in the Mercy books, so it was good to see him in the forefront, to see who he really is. (Warren and Kyle were another detail I’d forgotten about from Moon Called.)

“Redemption” is a story about Ben, who is a tremendous asshole at the start of the Mercy series. Ben is in IT, so there are a lot of geek jokes in there, most of which are over-explained for the non-geeks. But they’re still funny.

Ben heard Rajeev’s unspoken dismay. What were they thinking selling this half-written spaghetti code to a customer who has never offended us?

“…What I can’t fix is that the program won’t run unless the password is permanently set to PASSWORD and the username is permanently TEST. Since I’m working on databases that hold the US governmental secrets of the last hundred years, you’ll understand that is not acceptable.”

There was a long silence. Then Rajeev said, very carefully “Someone hard-coded the passwords.”

“That’s what I’m seeing,” agreed Ben blandly.

Ben really doesn’t much care for women, so keep that in mind when you read this story.

OK, one last geek bit.

All the main servers had names. Most of them were references to the usual geek favorites : Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Dr. Seuss characters. The only server name that was out of the ordinary was the server someone had named Tree a couple of years ago. Word was that on the eve of transferring to Washington, D.C., a DBA who never read anything but nonfiction had named it in a fit of defiance.

“Hollow” is an actual Mercy story, in which Mercy is requested to investigate a haunting. Mercy isn’t the main character in this story, Rick and Lisa are the story’s center, and that’s perfectly fine.

Change is neither good nor bad. It’s just change.

This is all me:

“It has always been an ambition of mine to serve as an object lesson for others.”

OUTTAKE FROM Silver Borne wasn’t in the book, but it brings Samuel and Ariana (from the first story) back together.

OUTTAKE FROM Night Broken is just a little but from Adam’s point-of-view, from the end of Night Broken. Like the other outtake, it’s not a true short story, but both are interesting and good.

All-in-all, an excellent collection of short stories, and I wasn’t the slightest bit disappointed Mercy appeared only rarely. Patricia Briggs is a good short story writer, and it’s lovely to read stories set in Mercy’s world that are peeks into the lives of other characters.
Rating: 9/10

Published by Ace

• Browse the archives:
  
• Moon Called » »
• « « The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches