Reviews

Beginning with Kelly Link's haunting version of a classic fairy tale ("Travels with the Snow Queen") and ending with A.S. Byatt's somber story of a princess's search for happiness ("Cold"), the 38 stories and eight poems that make up this collection offer a bird's-eye view of fantasy and horror for 1998. Essays summarizing the year in fantasy, horror, and film, as well as a list of Honorable Mentions, provide an overview of the state of imaginative fiction. Including works by Lisa Goldstein, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint, and numerous other genre notables and newcomers, this volume belongs in most fantasy collections. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

The delicious promise of the first piece, "Home for Christmas," a lyrical tale of modern-day magic by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, is fully realized in this year's offering of the best fantasy and horror by today's finest writers, including Terry Bisson, Joyce Carol Oates, A.S. Byatt, David Schow, Amy Tan and Jane Yolen. Editors Datlow and Windling should be congratulated for selecting a delightful blend that shows the variety of work created in both genres without compromising quality. The 46 short stories and poems range from the folkloric, such as "King of Crows" by Midori Snyder, which weaves the sorrowful tale of a musician who falls in love with a crow, to the truly terrifying as demonstrated in Stephen King's "Lunch at the Gotham Café," in which a crazed maître d' turns what is already a tense situation into a bloodbath. Delia Sherman offers a brilliant 17th-century pastiche about a printer's apprentice created by an alchemist from a pile of papers and ultimately returned to that form. From ghosts to unicorns, from dragons to murder on the Internet, there are stories to enthrall and entertain any reader with a love of the bizarre, the mysterious, the frightening. (Aug.)