Reviews

Myths and legends, fairytales and folklore, nightmares and dreams imbue the mundane with touches of magic while illustrating essential aspects of human nature. This annual anthology, the 13th in the series, explores those enchanting influences and gracefully demonstrates how the terms fantasy and horror encompass a range of creative writing from the "high" literary to the underrated comic. (Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics are more thought-provoking than most best sellers.) As usual, the editors begin with summaries of the past year in fantasy and horror in publishing, movies, and other media. Stressing the understanding of "interstitial" literatureDworks that cannot be pigeonholed to a single genre and that consists of much of imaginative writingDthe editors then present a variety of short stories and poems portraying wonders that are funny, subtle, lyric, and dreadful. Many are written by such accomplished and well-known authors as Ursula K. Le Guin, Gaiman, Charles de Lint, and Steve Resnic Tem. This volume of all-around high-quality storytelling is highly recommended to imaginations of all shapes and sizes.DAnn Kim, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

The 48 stories and poems in this third annual collection encompass a wide variety of subjects and styles. Several pieces, such as Dan Daly's ``Self-Portrait Mixed-Media on Pavement, 1988,'' are set in a recognizable time and place but offer a bracing--and sometimes shocking--twist, while others, like Tanith Lee's ``White as Sin, Now,'' create realities far removed from our everyday world. The volume features work by such stalwarts of these genres as Edward Bryant, Jane Yolen and Lisa Tuttle. Of particular note are Joyce Carol Oates's chronicle of the debilitating physical and psychological effects of a nuclear-like holocaust in ``Family''; James Powell's wry account of a murder investigation in Clowntown, where everyone looks literally as if they belong in a circus (``A Dirge for Clowntown''); Steven Millhauser's ``The Illusionist,'' about a magician who conjures people into existence using the power of his mind; and Robert R. McCammon's terrifying version of the end of the world in ``Something Passed By.'' Also included is a summation of the year's fictional and film works in fantasy and horror. Datlow is fiction editor at Omni magazine and Windling is a veteran fantasy editor. (Aug.)