Life on the Border

Borderland #3

by Terri Windling (Editor), Craig Shaw Gardner, Charles de Lint

All new stories by Emma Bull, Kara Dalkey, Charles de Lint, Craig Shaw Gardener, Michael Korolenko, Ellen Kushner, Will Shetterly, Midori Snyder, and Terri Windling (writing as Bellamy Bach); song lyrics by Emma Bull. Cover art by Rick Berry (Tor Books edition, 1991).

"Life on the Border turns the volume to 11, cranking up the energy and enthusiasm as the authors really hit their groove. It's like the song right before intermission, when the music's clearly gotten into the blood, and everyone's dancing....[T]his volume is one of the best in an outstanding series." — The Greenman Review.


NOTE: all the "Bellamy Bach" stories in the Borderland series were written by the editor/Borderland founder, Terri Windling.

Genres: Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Anthologies, Short Stories, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Young Adult

384 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published July 15, 1991

About the author

Terri Windling is an American editor, artist, essayist, and the author of books for both children and adults. Windling has won nine World Fantasy Awards, the Mythopoeic Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and her anthology The Armless Maiden, a fiction collection for adult survivors of child abuse, appeared on the shortlist for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. She was also honored with SFWA's Soltice Award in 2010, a lifetime achievement award for "significant contributions to the speculative fiction field as a writer, editor, artist, educator, and mentor". Windling's work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Lithuanian, Turkish, Russian, Japanese, and Korean.

In the American publishing field, Windling is one of the primary creative forces behind the mythic fiction resurgence that began in the early 1980s—first through her work as an innovative editor for the Ace and Tor Books fantasy lines; secondly as the creator of the Fairy Tales series of novels (featuring reinterpretations of classic fairy tale themes by Jane Yolen, Steven Brust, Pamela Dean, Patricia C. Wrede, Charles de Lint, and others); and thirdly as the editor of over thirty anthologies of magical fiction. She is also recognized as one of the founders of the urban fantasy genre, having published and promoted the first novels of Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, and other pioneers of the form.

With Ellen Datlow, Windling edited 16 volumes of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (1986–2003), an anthology series that reached beyond the boundaries of genre fantasy to incorporate magic realism, surrealism, poetry, and other forms of magical literature. Datlow and Windling also edited the Snow White, Blood Red series of literary fairy tales for adult readers, as well as many anthologies of myth & fairy tale inspired fiction for younger readers (such as The Green Man, The Faery Reel, and The Wolf at the Door). Windling also created and edited the Borderland series for teenage readers.

As an author, Windling's fiction includes The Wood Wife (winner of the Mythopoeic Award for Novel of the Year) and several children's books: The Raven Queen, The Changeling, A Midsummer Night's Faery Tale, The Winter Child, and The Faeries of Spring Cottage. Her essays on myth, folklore, magical literature and art have been widely published in newsstand magazines, academic journals, art books, and anthologies. She was a contributor to The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, edited by Jack Zipes.

As an artist, Windling specializes in work inspired by myth, folklore, and fairy tales. Her art has been exhibited across the US, as well as in the UK and France.

Windling is the founder of the Endicott Studio, an organization dedicated to myth-inspired arts, and co-editor (with Midori Snyder) of The Journal of Mythic Arts. She also sits on the board of the Mythic Imagination Institute. A former New Yorker, Windling spend many years in Tucson, Arizona, and now lives in Devon, England. She is married to dramatist Howard Gayton, co-director of the Ophaboom Theatre Company.

Reviews

[Chloe Frizzle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lost in the mail 3⭐
Life on the border 3⭐
Nevernever 4⭐
Nightwail 4⭐
Alison Gross 4⭐
Berlin 3⭐
Reynardine 2⭐
Light and Shadow 1⭐
Rain and Thunder 4⭐

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the third collection of shorter works (up to a novella in length) set in Bordertown, a place where human and Elven realities meet, so both magic and technology work, and both work far from perfect. I read it as a part of a Buddy read challenge at ORBIT – Otherworldly Reads, Bold Ideas, and Tales. SF & F Short Stories and Novelettes group. The book was originally published in 1991, a few years after the first two (both in 1986) and was largely aimed at the fans of the series - quite a few characters from the previous books reappear.

Contents:
Lost in the Mail (I) by Ellen Kushner a girl runs away from home to find a way to the Borderland. She meets people who help her and show doesn't know what the 'yellow brick road' means. 3*
Global News Service: Life on the Border short story uncredited just an outline what Bordertown is, how it emerged, etc.
Nevernever by Will Shetterly we follow the mute werewolf Wolfboy from the last book's murder mystery, as he meets the Dead Warlock. He helps her and they join forces, becoming friends. However, he has an ulterior motive - he knows her as Leda, you, years ago, just for fun, cursed him, so he plans revenge. 3.5
Lost in the Mall (II) short story Ellen Kushner a glimpse that not all elves are beautiful and that trade is the king in Borderlands
Nightwail short story Kara Dalkey Squirt is a gew girl in a squat. She hears wails at night and then finds another squatter dead. She investigates to find out that 7 years ago, another girl here committed suicide and has now turned into a banshee. She cures her in a Borderland way by playing guitar and singing to the best of her ability 3*
Lost in the Mall (IV) short story Ellen Kushner our runaway is hungry enough to eat garbage, but local gang attacks her...
Alison Gross novella Midori Snyder Sara is a belly dancer and Thrasher is a skater. They fell in love and Sara got pregnant. Because of her past psychological trauma, she decides to give her newborn to Alison Gross, an externally beautiful but internally creepy leech witch, who keeps her beauty by sacrificing newborns. Several characters from earlier stories came to help her... 3*
Lost in the Mall (V) short story Ellen Kushner the girl is thrown away from a club, but an elf takes her with him, so that she can tell stories of her life. This is a trap, but about it we'll read in the next letter
Berlin novella Charles de Lint Berlin is the leader of the Diggers, a group whose goal is to help with food and shelter to those in need. The story starts when one of her team, a former drug addict, Nicky, is captured by Ysa Cran and her gang of Blood pushers. They force him to eat the newest, instantly addictive drug and he commits suicide rather than go through the withdrawal again. Ysa has a grudge against Berlin, so she tries to make a periah out of her. A lot of cameos from earlier stories. Well-written but forgettable. 3.25*
Lost in the Mall (VI) short story Ellen Kushner so, the girl is living at Oberon House now
Reynardine novella Michael Korolenko a young (20) human sleuth, whose primary trade is to find teenage runaways and who likes old noir, searches for a girl, Marsha. He is visited by an elven detective, who also searches for (elfish) runaway. They don't like each other much, but join forces. Soon, they find the bodies (elven and human) of different girls, with their hands cut off and understand that a serial killer is at large. Of course, there is magic too, some fights with monsters. 3.2*
Light and Shadow short story Craig Shaw Gardner an interesting new (for this setting) concept - as people in Bordertown witness that there are quite a few persons behaving like film noir characters and they are - from movies boosted by pixie dust. 3.5*
Lost in the Mall (VII) short story Ellen Kushner so she is in Oberon's house and she tries to run away
Rain and Thunder novella Terri Windling Sammy Tucker is a Pack Leader, a human gang, protecting humans from elves (Bloods). His leadership is questioned by young bloods, who want to fight because they haven't yet felt the consequences of such fights. Meanwhile, a girl he knew, Gray, returned from behind the border with her elven friend Wicker. Gray was blinded to keep elfish secrets, but she can see when she turns into a cat... then Bloods (?) unexpectedly attack Gray - should Sam openly fight with Bloods now? 3.75*
For it All poem Emma Bull I'm not into poetry
Lost in the Mall (VIII-IX) short story Ellen Kushner the happy end for the story

Overall, this book is weaker than the previous two

[B.R. Sanders · Rating 4 out of 5]

LIFE ON THE BORDER is the third installment of the Borderland series created and edited by Terri Windling. Like the two volumes before it, is an anthology of short stories by multiple authors set in a shared universe where Elfland has returned to the human world, bringing with it trade, unreliable magic and technology, and the elves. This volume is larger than the previous two and features new authors as well as familiar ones. But Life on the Border felt different from BORDERLAND and BORDERTOWN to me in a couple of important ways, both of which, I think, made it a stronger collection.

First, LIFE ON THE BORDER does a really excellent job capitalizing on the fact that it’s the third book in the series. The authors here dig deeper into the stories of characters who have come before, picking up threads and answering questions the other two volumes left behind. Bellamy Bach’s “Rain and Thunder,” for instance, revisits Gray, a character first introduced in Borderland who we last saw leaving the human world in the form of a cat. Stick and Koga, also introduced in previous volumes of the series, get a strange and unexpected shared backstory in Charles De Lint’s “Berlin.” And Will Shetterly starts Life on the Border with a Wolfboy story. The intertextual connections don’t stop there—Farrel Din alludes to the plot of “Prodigy” in this volume’s “Light and Shadow.” Characters who appear in one story within this volume, such as the curiously magical skateboarder Deki, show up again later. Altogether, this serves to create a sense of a real, living neighborhood. By using the groundwork laid by Borderland and Bordertown, this volume makes the reader feel more like they are coming home than venturing into some unknown place. Three volumes in and Bordertown has become a place where you know everyone’s name.

The other real strength of this volume is that it feels like it’s grown up with the reader. BORDERLAND was published in 1986, and LIFE ON THE BORDER was published 5 years later in 1991. Where BORDERLAND felt distinctively (and I believe intentionally) Young Adult in tone and content, LIFE ON THE BORDER feels much more adult. The first two volumes felt like the runaway’s honeymoon period; this volume feels like when the runaway really learns what town is like. The elves, for instance, have been flighty and tricky in previous volumes, but the elves in this volume especially are dark, mean creatures. Wolfboy runs into a particularly brutal batch of elves in the Nevernever who clearly see him as less than a person. Bordertown is plagued by an elvin monster in “Reynardine,” and it seems implied at the end of “Alison Gross” that Alison herself is an elvin witch since she’s banished across the border in Elfland. There is, again, the punishment meted out to Gray when the elves across the border find out she’s human. The protagonist of Ellen Kushner’s “Lost in the Mail” finds out the hard way that the theft of humans’ individuality is an elvin hobby when she lands in Oberon House—it’s a chilling, vampiric view of the elves that has stuck with me since I first read this volume years ago.

All in all, LIFE ON THE BORDER is more cohesive than its two predecessors. Standouts for me in particular were “Nightwail” by Kara Dalkey, “Rain and Thunder” by Bellamy Bach and “Nevernever” by Will Shetterly. On the whole, I think the strengths of this book are lost if you haven’t read and loved the previous two volumes in the series, so I wouldn’t say it’s a stand-alone book or a particularly great introduction to the Borderland series, but it is an excellent extension of that series. I would have liked to see more insight into elvin culture—as I said, I appreciate the darkness of the elves here, but the book’s unrelenting focus on human stories could have been better balanced. It felt, a bit, like the book was written by the Pack—Bordertown’s staunchly human-only gang.

[Caitlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like any anthology, I liked some stories more than others. They're strongly tied together l, featuring a very short epistolary story at the start, end, and periodically between the others, which overlap in the way of events and characters, as well as setting.

A little grim, exploring the darker side of mixing humans, elves, and magic together. People, regardless of species, are flawed. They fall in love, make mistakes, hurt each other... an up and down adventure.

[Janni]

So far, I think Bordertown remains my favorite of these books, with "Danceland" and "Demon" among my favorite stories in any of them.

[James Caruso · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friend loaned me this book a few weeks before I moved from Ann Arbor, MI, to Falls Church, VA, in late 1991. It came with me. (Sorry, Janet.)

Borderland #3 was my introduction to urban fantasy. My favorite was the Kara Dalkey story, "Nightwail," about an aspiring singer, haunted by a banshee. The sense of melancholy, and a feeling of being alone, even in a crowd of alleged friends, built up from the first paragraph and hit a crescendo at the end.

Other stories ranged from good to excellent.

I'm currently writing an urban fantasy novel, and this book opened my eyes to the genre's possibilities.

[Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this series.

What a great anthology! The third in the series of Urban Fantasy short stories beginning in 1984. Each story is poignant and well thought out. Although, I thought that one in particular didn't resonate within the world in the same way as the others, this having not been written by one of the veteran writers though it might make sense.

I'm looking forward to continuing on with it.

[Katy Came · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best shared world series ever

[Kymba Khan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Gardener story was weak; out of place as the only homage story with too much amusement on the readers part expected to carry it.

[Michelle Morrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

My very favorite shared universe, about a city on the blurred edge of earth and faerie, and the people who find their way there. One of many anthologies and stand-alone novels.

[Paul Freeland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bordertown book - what more is there to say?

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An eternal enthusiast of the Bordertown books, this was just as lovely and varied as the previous anthologies.

[Jeff Youngstrom]

My review from August 17, 1996