bloodygranuaile

At my very first Readercon, I bought the at-the-time recently published Bone Swans: Stories by C.S.E. Cooney, a very charming and extraverted woman I met at a hotel room party. I liked Cooney very much and I also like reading short stories very much when I actually do it, and yet I am really, really bad at getting around to reading all the short story collections I buy at Readercon. So for this year’s Readercon I put it in the Bag of Shame, as a reminder to not buy any more damn short story collections until I read the ones I have.

I didn’t get much reading done this Readercon but I did opt for Bone Swans when I did dig into the Bag of Shame, and it took me approximately the whole convention to get through these five short-ish stories (novelettes, maybe?). And, about as I expected, I am kicking myself for not reading it a lot sooner, like as soon as I bought it.

All the stories in this collection are sort of mythic and fairy-tale-y, but there the resemblance to each other ends. They’re all quite different in tone and language. Two of them are recognizable as fairy tale retellings–The Bone Swans of Amandale being a Pied Piper story, and How the Milkmaid Struck a Bargain with the Crooked One being a romantic retelling of Rumpelstiltskin–and if the other three are based on existing stories I did not recognize them. My favorite was probably The Big Bah-Ha, which is about a bunch of children navigating a world that’s killed off all the grown-ups and then an amusement-park-themed afterlife that’s been corrupted. If this story reminds me of anything already existing it’s probably Spirited Away, although that comparison possibly does a bit of a disservice to how gory and grungy the world of The Big Bah-Ha is.

Overall, this collection is… well, it’s exactly the type of thing I come to Readercon to discover! What took me so fucking long!