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A review by halibut
This Dreaming Isle by Gareth E. Rees, Catriona Ward, Richard V. Hirst, Angela Readman, Jeanette Ng, Alison Littlewood, Robert Shearman, Alison Moore, Gary Budden, Stephen Volk, Aliya Whiteley, Ramsey Campbell, Andrew Michael Hurley, James Miller, Jenn Ashworth, Dan Coxon, Tim Lebbon, Kirsty Logan
4.0
As with most anthologies, a mixed bag. The highlights for me were Alison Moore's story The Stone Dead, and Andrew Michael Hurley's In My Father's House. Alison Moore is excellent at drawing negative space, things which are absent, missing or not being said, and that style made for a great ghost story, operating on a less openly fantastical scale than the others. Hurley's story slips from mundane to symbolic as the characters move more into the landscape, which capture the overall feel of the anthology as well as being an excellent standalone weird story. I thought the strained mother/daughter relationship of Old Trash by Jenn Ashworth was well captured.
There were a handful of stories centred around lake or sea creatures (selkies etc), which didn't really do much for me; I don't know if it's just that I don't have a particular existing interest in them, but it felt a little too much like the stories would present features of the folklore associated with these creatures and that that should be sufficient to be interesting. Not bad stories, but just didn't hit for me.
The only story I disliked was Jeanette Ng's We Regret To Inform You. The format is an email exchange between academics which uses a lot of space on academic-sounding back and forth for little effect, which is wrapped in a further layer of these emails being curated and footnoted by a later researcher whose footnotes give tangential mentions of some fantasy or folkloric bits and pieces that seemed included only to provide the simple pleasure of recognition. The main character, a historian and writer, eventually seems involved in some ritual of writing which has material changes on the past and present; the idea of the magical power of writing and fiction to work some effect on the world is an idea I find very frustrating and self-regarding.
There were a handful of stories centred around lake or sea creatures (selkies etc), which didn't really do much for me; I don't know if it's just that I don't have a particular existing interest in them, but it felt a little too much like the stories would present features of the folklore associated with these creatures and that that should be sufficient to be interesting. Not bad stories, but just didn't hit for me.
The only story I disliked was Jeanette Ng's We Regret To Inform You. The format is an email exchange between academics which uses a lot of space on academic-sounding back and forth for little effect, which is wrapped in a further layer of these emails being curated and footnoted by a later researcher whose footnotes give tangential mentions of some fantasy or folkloric bits and pieces that seemed included only to provide the simple pleasure of recognition. The main character, a historian and writer, eventually seems involved in some ritual of writing which has material changes on the past and present; the idea of the magical power of writing and fiction to work some effect on the world is an idea I find very frustrating and self-regarding.