Fairies and unicorns and vampires, oh my

[bloodygranuaile]

I read another short story anthology! That's like, two in a year, which is pretty good for me. It does however leave me in the awkward position of having to write a review for a short story anthology, a type of review-writing that I detest and am bad at, even by the rambling standards of my book-reviewing habits.

 

The collection I read was Holly Black's The Poison Eaters and Other Stories, which I selected because it's a collection of Holly Black stories, duh. The stories within it are very much everything I like about Holly Black, mostly full of teenagers getting into various kinds of supernatural trouble, often via first getting into regular mundane trouble like running away from home or getting drunk and trying to break into abandoned school buildings.

 

There is a short story called The Coldest Girl in Coldtown which obviously takes place in the same world as the book of the same title but has different characters and a different plot although with a similar ending; it's clearly an early draft of the idea that would become the full novel. Going Ironside is a short story that takes place in the Tithe universe, featuring Rath Roiben Rye and Cornelius, mostly. A lot of the stories are the sort of modern urban fantasy that Black is known for, but there are a couple of more fairy-tale-type secondary world fables in here as well, such as The Dog King, about werewolves, and The Poison Eaters, a fairy tale about a trio of Rappaccini's Daughter-esque poisonous sisters. Some of the stories are funny; most of them are creepy and/or haunting; the best ones are both.

 

While this collection was published several years ago and I think Holly Black has grown as a writer since her first books (which is what one would hope, I suppose), I think this collection still really showcases why she's become such a popular and important voice in teen fantasy. The stories are creepy, funny, heartwarming, relatable, and lushly written, often cute without being twee, and channeling the feeling that there's more weird shit in the world than we know.