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Pleased with this review by Matt Staggs:
Realms of Fantasy June 2010-anyone who wants to post this, may.
Tails of Wonder and Imagination: Cat Stories, edited by Ellen Datlow, Night Shade Books, trade paperback, $15.95, ISBN: 978-1-59780-170-6
From Ernest Hemingway’s famous six-toed polydactyl pussycats to speculative fiction’s well-known feline fanciers like Michael Moorcock, John Scalzi, and Neil Gaiman, writers and cats have always had a special relationship. Editor Ellen Datlow, no small fan of cats herself, has collected the best of cat-themed fantastic fiction in Tails of Wonder and Imagination. This is the second volume of cat stories edited under Datlow’s capable direction, the first being 1996’s all-original horror fiction collection Twists of the Tale, and three stories from that volume are reprinted here: “Catch” by Ray Vukcevich, “No Heaven Will Not Ever Heaven Be...” by A. R. Morlan, and “Not Waving” by Michael Marshall Smith.
As anyone who shares a home with a cat can tell you, they’re complicated creatures. They are hiding one moment and purring at your feet the next. They’re soft and cuddly, but have sharp claws and fangs like needles. Much like cats themselves, the stories collected in Tails of Wonder and Imagination are an unpredictable bunch. Beyond their consistently high quality, there’s no one theme uniting these stories beyond the presence of cats—or catlike beings—in one form or another. To be sure, there are more than just house cats lurking in these pages: manticores, ghosts, and more inhabit the pages therein, and not all of them are friendly.
There are forty stories in all. Some of the highlights: Charles de Lint offers a story of sorcery, were-cats, and revenge in “Dark Eyes, Faith, and Devotion,” one of his Newford tales. A manticore’s venom holds the key to recovering a wizard’s long-lost love in Jeffrey Ford’s “The Manticore Spell.” Nancy Etchemendy, who in the introduction to her story relates her own ambivalent feelings toward cats, weaves a tale of a mysterious artifact and even more mysterious deaths in “Cat in Glass.” Peter S. Beagle offers a particularly charming tale of a mouse who decides to attend Cat School in “Gordon, the Self-Made Cat.”
Like any self-respecting feline, most of the fiction in Tails of Wonder and Imagination refuses easy classification, but readers who love cats will find these tales well worth chasing.
Realms of Fantasy June 2010-anyone who wants to post this, may.
Tails of Wonder and Imagination: Cat Stories, edited by Ellen Datlow, Night Shade Books, trade paperback, $15.95, ISBN: 978-1-59780-170-6
From Ernest Hemingway’s famous six-toed polydactyl pussycats to speculative fiction’s well-known feline fanciers like Michael Moorcock, John Scalzi, and Neil Gaiman, writers and cats have always had a special relationship. Editor Ellen Datlow, no small fan of cats herself, has collected the best of cat-themed fantastic fiction in Tails of Wonder and Imagination. This is the second volume of cat stories edited under Datlow’s capable direction, the first being 1996’s all-original horror fiction collection Twists of the Tale, and three stories from that volume are reprinted here: “Catch” by Ray Vukcevich, “No Heaven Will Not Ever Heaven Be...” by A. R. Morlan, and “Not Waving” by Michael Marshall Smith.
As anyone who shares a home with a cat can tell you, they’re complicated creatures. They are hiding one moment and purring at your feet the next. They’re soft and cuddly, but have sharp claws and fangs like needles. Much like cats themselves, the stories collected in Tails of Wonder and Imagination are an unpredictable bunch. Beyond their consistently high quality, there’s no one theme uniting these stories beyond the presence of cats—or catlike beings—in one form or another. To be sure, there are more than just house cats lurking in these pages: manticores, ghosts, and more inhabit the pages therein, and not all of them are friendly.
There are forty stories in all. Some of the highlights: Charles de Lint offers a story of sorcery, were-cats, and revenge in “Dark Eyes, Faith, and Devotion,” one of his Newford tales. A manticore’s venom holds the key to recovering a wizard’s long-lost love in Jeffrey Ford’s “The Manticore Spell.” Nancy Etchemendy, who in the introduction to her story relates her own ambivalent feelings toward cats, weaves a tale of a mysterious artifact and even more mysterious deaths in “Cat in Glass.” Peter S. Beagle offers a particularly charming tale of a mouse who decides to attend Cat School in “Gordon, the Self-Made Cat.”
Like any self-respecting feline, most of the fiction in Tails of Wonder and Imagination refuses easy classification, but readers who love cats will find these tales well worth chasing.