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Charmed and Dangerous
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Charmed and Dangerous edited by Jordan Castillo Price
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Whoa. You really read that in record time! I'm not sure if I'll read them all straight through but with all these great writers I may not be able to stop. I am heading up to the Adirondacks this weekend though and I usually like to read print books up there. It just suits the sort of throwback feel to the place.
This wonderful anthology of stories with paranormal themes embraces the finest writers in this genre and offers substantial, beautifully written tales of romance and magic. I’m not a big anthology fan, mostly because I like long works – but these are no mere snippets. Each story is a fully developed narrative, rich with all the things we readers care about. The bonus, of course, is that they all feel connected to each other by their shared paranormal themes and characters.
Rhys Ford’s fast-paced and compelling “Dim Sum Asylum” shows us a gritty but recognizable future San Francisco, in which Roku MacCormick, a mix-race (meaning part human, part fae, part Japanese, part Irish) detective works a strange cursed-object case with a new partner, Trent Leonard. Roku’s back story is dark and as complex as the city he calls home.
Ginn Hale’s “Swift and the Black Dog” shows us a world that is more like a post-apocalyptic Dune, grotesque and beautiful by turns, in which we meet a young wizard named Jack Swift, who was once the leader of a band of revolutionary teenagers. Swift is forced to face some harsh realities in the world he and his friends helped create. Hale, in her typical fashion, creates visions of exquisite beauty and desperate violence.
KJ Charles’ “A Queer Trade” takes us to her world of the Magpie Lord series, where an unlucky apprentice, Crispin Tredarloe, must try to retrieve some misplaced papers in the shop of London wastepaper merchant Ned Hall. The author’s uncanny ability to create an authentic Victorian world in which magic is part of the landscape is slyly acknowledged by the opening line: “Marleigh was dead, to begin with.” Her homage to Dickens made me laugh, just as her tale of bone and blood feels both true to period in tone and engagingly modern in sentiment.
“Magically Delicious” presents a contemporary Washington, DC, in which federal bureaucracy attempts to regulate all manner of imaginary creatures from goblins to leprechauns. Keith Curry, restauranteur turned magical food infraction specialist for the government, gets caught up in a series of mysterious hexings that involves his boyfriend, half-goblin Gunther Heartman. There are some truly hilarious moments with Curry’s in-laws, and a plot that feels like a mashup of a sitcom and an episode of “Mission: Impossible.”
Jordan Castillo Price’s Psycop hero Victor Bayne and his FBI boyfriend Jacob take us on a psychological tour of Bayne’s first ghostly encounter in “Everyone’s Afraid of Clowns.” What I found particularly appealing about this story is that, at its heart, it’s really about Victor’s desire to make things better for the ghosts in his life.
In “The Thirteenth Hex,” I’m pretty sure that Jordan L. Hawk intentionally evoked Caleb Carr’s “The Alienist” by using that term in the same paragraph in which she introduces Theodore Roosevelt as NY’s police commissioner in the late 19th century. The magical subdivision of Roosevelt’s police department, made up of witches, their shifter familiars, and non-magical paper pushers known as hexmen, are faced with what seems to be serial killer using over-the-counter patent hexes. Dominic Kopecky dreams of being magical, but has settled for being a hexman, until he meets Rook, a crow shifter without a witch to call his own.
Riley Murrough is an over-educated barista loser until he’s confronted by a swarm of demons in an alley and rescued by a leather-clad stud named Khalon who is under the unhappy impression that Riley is his prince intended. Most of Charlie Cochet’s tongue-in-cheek romance, “The Soldati Prince,” takes place in Khalon’s world, which, we are told, is somewhere in Upstate New York.
Lou Harper, the queen of gay noir fiction, takes the reader on another magic murder hunt in “One Hex Too Many.” A world-weary detective, Mike Mulligan (of the Extramundane Crimes Division) is assigned a new partner in detective Hugh Fox, and once again they have to track down a murderer by magic. This is the one story in the book that seemed to be the beginning of a potential series.
Andrea Speed’s “Josh of the Damned vs. the Bathroom of Doom” is actually part of a series: a spoof with paranormal teeth, making me think of Rick Riordon’s Percy Jackson novels mixed with Kevin Smith’s cult film “The Clerk.” Somehow the title “Convenience Store of the Damned” kept running through my mind.
Astrid Amara gets the last-but-not-least position with “The Trouble with Hexes.” Tim Keller, a private detective who threw his tattooed boyfriend Vincent out for messing around with magic, finds himself in a deadly predicament, and has to turn to Vincent to save his own life. This is a very personal story, as much about the two men as it is about the race to find the root of the hex.
Every reader will find his or her favorites among this group of ten winners. For anyone who follows paranormal fiction, this is a must-read.
Mod
Me, too. And she managed to make the interractial aspect plausible and apt.
For those of you that loved "A Queer Trade" by KJ Charles, she's just put up a page for the sequel that will come out in March, Rag and Bone.
Mod
Woohoo! But---I don't want to wait that long!
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Rag and Bone (other topics)Rag and Bone (other topics)
Charmed and Dangerous (other topics)
The blurb is a bit long, so to see the contents of the book just look here: Charmed and Dangerous: Ten Tales of Gay Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy
What a great line-up of authors! And their contributions don't disappoint. As in all anthologies, there are some stories that the reader will enjoy more than others. And in this case I would say that fully half of the entries receive very high marks from me---and the remainder aren't shoddy, either. There's really only one tale that didn't quite work for me; it felt a bit incomplete, like we didn't have enough information, resulting in some plot holes.
But the rest---a lot of fun. In fact, I think I enjoyed it too much---that is, I read it all too quickly. I should have savoured the stories one by one instead of rushing headlong through the lot, so that they ended up blurring together a bit in my mind.
I can't really pick out a favourite, but will say that I particularly enjoyed A Queer Trade by KJ Charles and The Thirteenth Hex by Jordan L. Hawk.
Of this collection, Jordan Castillo Price said: For authors who wanted to write in an existing storyverse, I asked them to create something that would stand well completely alone too.... There's an Irregulars and a PsyCop story in the mix. KJ Charles' story is in her Charm of Magpies 'verse, and Josh of the Damned is also a series.
It's funny, though, because when I edited these stories, several of them felt fleshed out enough to be pieces of a larger whole and though I thought they were part of an existing series, they weren't. I was positive Astrid Amara's guys were already knocking around somewhere. And I think several authors will be exploring the new worlds they've created more.
I'll also note, you certainly get your money's worth with this book---it runs 480 pages, while most genre m/m fiction tends to end up being around 200-225 pages. So---good value, and quite entertaining---recommended!