Amal El-Mohtar's Reviews > Glitter & Mayhem

Requisite Humble-Is-For-Pies disclaimer: I have a story in this.

Further disclaimer: I was having a very, very, very bad day when I decided to immerse myself in this book, and reading it went a long way towards making me feel like something more than a smear on the pavement.

Furthest disclaimer: I know and love several of the people involved in the making of this book.

So! I loved it. I did not love every single story, but I liked almost all of them, really liked a significant number, and outright passionately adored about five. I read a fair number of anthologies and this high a hit rate is pretty unusual for me. The last time I liked an anthology this much was probably when reading Mike Allen's Clockwork Phoenix books.

My absolute favourites were David Schwartz' "Apex Jump," Cat Rambo's "Of Selkies, Disco Balls, and Anna Plane," Tim Pratt's "Revels in the Land of Ice," Maria Dahvana Headley's "Such & Such Said to So & So," and Sofia Samatar's "Bess, the Landlord's Daughter, Goes for Drinks with the Green Girl," so I want to talk about them at some length.

Schwartz' story is like when a cocktail manages to be so perfectly balanced between fruity sweetness and boozy bitterness that it transcends mere mixing to become more than the sum of its parts. There's a pain at the core of it that's sublimated into this ecstatic, triumphant loveliness that left me happy, and given the aforementioned very very very bad day, it was welcome and refreshing and lovely, to the point where even just thinking about it makes me smile.

Both Rambo's and Pratt's had such finely sketched characters, relationships, realizations, and dexterity in putting those elements into play with each other that I was left completely satisfied. They rock the 6K word short story form in ways that just delight me. The last line of Pratt's in particular was wonderful, and I say this as someone who spent the first half of the last decade overindulging in fairy-inspired-artist narratives.

I loved Headley and Samatar's best because in an anthology that had a large number of urban fantasy / mythic fiction offerings (including my own), theirs did things with form and voice that were very different, very textured, and more experiential than narrative in ways I adored.

I thought it was also overall a very well-curated anthology, and one that hit all my synaesthetic buttons in the right way. I've seen reviews where people describe feeling the partying to be a bit same-y, but my experience was that the anthology's stories are more light-through-prism than light reflecting off a disco-ball: the authors take the theme and direct their stories through it such that the result is a riot of colour. And also sound -- I want very much to see or make a playlist that includes every song mentioned or alluded to in the collection, because it is thick with music.