ellen_datlow | review of Black Thorn, White Rose

review of Black Thorn, White Rose

Tehani Wessely of Australia reviews the new edition of Black Thorn, White Rose. She mostly likes the stories and overall gives the book a very good review, but this paragraph struck me:

"Fourteen years is a long time, and these stories first saw print in 1994. So much has changed in the world since then: the ways we perceive good and evil not the least, but also the things that have the power to shock us, to scare us, and to permit us to suspend our disbelief. Hence, there were stories in this anthology that felt old, dated, tired. It is possible to envisage them as fresh and groundbreaking when first published, but the intervening years, and many similar collections (including a number produced by the same editors, some of which I will review soon), have left this anthology feeling a little stale."

Dragonkat@LJ

Once I edit an anthology I rarely reread the stories in print. I've already read them a number of times during the editing process. So I'm not a good judge of this.

Is it true that an anthology series such as the adult fairy tale anthologies, all published in the mid-to late 90s can become dated? I'd think it would completely depend on each individual story. (this is for any fiction written after traumatic current events such as post Vietnam war, post 9/11, et al).

If the story is tied to a particular sensibility or for example, air travel is depicted more innocently than now in our time of terrorism fear does this necessarily date the story or merely make it a snapshot of time?

Because my head is a complete muddle of stuffiness and I'm feeling kind of wretched, I'm not sure if this makes sense, but I'd love some opinions.

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Not for me they haven't.

But I love the OLD, original fairy tales, before they were disney-fied, before they were seetened up for children. The original ones that WERE written for adults.

so for me, they will never become tired, old or stale.

If the story is tied to a particular sensibility or for example, air travel is depicted more innocently than now in our time of terrorism fear does this necessarily date the story or merely make it a snapshot of time?

I think they're both ways of saying the same thing, and that one is more polite than the other. The pieces that get the "snapshot of time" designation are the ones people will be reading some time into the future, and looking at those dated elements and seeing them as unique, windows into a time long past.

I think the film "Dog Day Afternoon" is a pretty good example of that: a snapshot of time from the seventies. That movie certainly wouldn't have been made today.

In other words, a snapshot into time gives us insight into an era while still being a story that speaks to you, rather than having the artifacts of that time make the tale incomprehensible to contemporary sensibilities.

I guess I'm just worried that the "dated" feeling takes away some of the enjoyment. For what it's worth, Terri and I weren't aiming to shock or scare the reader in any of the six anthologies.

To shock and scare" are what I might aim for with a horror anthology. However, if the reader can't suspend disbelief while reading any kind of fantasy because of a jarring intrusion of a current reality, that's a problem.

That's definitely a risk with reprint anthologies, I think, or reissues of older anthologies like this one. Just as the zeitgeist colors the tone of stories that writers write (how many dystopic stories have come out in the past few years?), it just as much colors how readers look at them. But while I don't think you can get away from that sense entirely, neither do I think you should really fret about it. Like I said, the best stories can tell themselves while having the cultural intrusions enhance rather than take away from that.

For me (and I'm showing precisely how young I am here :), Harlan Ellison's work is a really good example of that principle at work.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you said, "after traumatic current events." Artists in all fields are still dealing with the cultural aftershock of 9/11. Frankly, I think they'd still be dealing with Vietnam if 9/11 hadn't replaced it.

I don't know if that's particularly detrimental to this particular one. I have to admit that I've only read certain stories from the series while in the bookstore, since I'm young and indigent, but what I did read didn't strike me as such. But, well, like I said, I didn't get the whole picture.

Yeah. The one thing I DID hope for was to at least update the bios. Initially I would have been able to but instead the publisher just shot from the original books and didn't re-set.

I love reading a lot of Harlan Ellison's work. "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" still packs a wallop.

'Is it true that an anthology series such as the adult fairy tale anthologies, all published in the mid-to late 90s can become dated?'
of course.
in this particular case, i can see how one or two of the stories might be (i'm thinking specifically of the beckett and cole stories), but i think that reviewer is rather overstating the case and that the bulk of the book has aged quite well.
i also very much disagree that the social perception of 'good' and 'evil' has changed markedly over the past fourteen years and am a bit puzzled by that statement.

I hope Tehani will come by later (the time difference in oz means that most correspondence is in the evening NY time).

It's possible that the concept of dated is not so much about setting, but about the tone and feel of the story.

Urban fantasy before Buffy, for instance, might be considered dated by current readers who began reading after the post-buffy UF snark and wit became almost imbedded.

Interesting point. Kind of makes sense. Which keeps me thinking if it is okay to feel in such a way. :-)

Now THIS makes me nervous, because I'm editing an urban fantasy anthology and I have my own ideas of what is encompassed by "urban fantasy"--and it's not Buffy. I loved Buffy but that didn't seem to be "urban" at all...Sunnyvale was a small town...I know that urban fantasy has come to mean paranormal romance in some circles but that's not it either (for me anyway). I'm trying for stories that are about distinct cities (real or imaginary) and a wide range from the paranormal detective type of story to high tech cityscapes. We'll see what I end up with.

Now THIS makes me nervous

Argh. I'm sorry =/. It was thrown out as a possible explanation for why some readers might find the work dated -- but it wasn't meant to be an "all readers will find this dated". I think our entry points into the genre as readers are always going to affect the way we feel about what we read when we do come to it because some of the tropes will trickle down and become much more common in later works, but I honestly didn't mean to cause more stress.

Oh, I'll get over it :-) I don't think anyone would want a WHOLE antho of snark, after all.

This is like saying mythology in general is dated.

I think not. Fairy tales and myths inform readers of human psychological dynamics through use of metaphor. History itself is just that: history. But describing social evolution through the art forms will never be passe.

I don't think they are old fashioned stories. Really. Thing is, the anthologie series fascinated me in a way that I "ebay'd" a missing edition just a year ago and I didn't have the feeling that the story is not longer up to date.

Truth be told, there are quite a few stories in it that I didn't like sooo much, but on the other hands, there are some that I still DO love. And BLACK THORN, WHITE ROSE was one of the anthology editions that did have GREAT stories, as - for example "Stronger than Time" (Wrede), "The Black Swan" (S. Wade" or "The Goose Girl" (Wynne-Jones).

I can re-read them and still love them.

And I am not saying that *just* because I am a fan.

Co-editing an anthology usually means that there are always a few stories going in that are a compromise: one editor loves it, the other doesn't but they agree to disagree and use the story anyway (unless there is exceptionally strong disagreement). I'm sure there are stories in all the books I've edited and co-edited that don't hold up for me.

Right now, I'm rereading lots of stories that I remember loving (horror stories) because of the 25 years of modern horror reprint anthology I'm editing...I'm finding that some of the stories I loved loved loved twenty years ago, do nothing for me. Others are still transgressive/shocking/disturbing/just plain readable.

Well, I tend to think that for every story there *can* be a right and a wrong time for reading, as for example: I tried to read a novel twice and throw it away because I didn't get "gripped" by it, and then, a few years later, I tried it a third time and just LOVED it.

Then again, I LOVED some novels back when I was a teenager. This is similar to what you said. I tried to read some of them as a grown-up (at least as grown-up as I am *g*) and some of them I still liked - others I just couldn't understand what I loved on them.

The story didn't change. But the reader did.

I agree. There are books I just loved as a child and young adult. I have no desire to reread them as I'm afraid that I won't enjoy them the way I did the first time around.

OTOH, I could never get through Sartre's nonfiction volume Being and Nothingness ;-)

Tropes can become dated, especially if over-used. I don't think the stories themselves become dated, unless content was always "better" than execution. (I do, however, agree that certain stories become so closely identified with/inseparable from the time-period during which they were written that they are best enjoyed and assessed within the context of being historical artifacts...a lot of stuff from the 1920s and '30s, for example (Lovecraft, etc.) is really difficult to see as not being inherently racist, unless you allow yourself to go: "Yeah, but that's how some people thought, which doesn't make it right, just so...okay, on with the story."

Absolutely. I hope that nothing like that is the case with our anthologies.

Terri and I have occasionally tossed up the idea of creating a new anthology of adult fairy tales, but I worry that the sub-genre has been played out. I know we can get writers (our regulars and new ones) to write excellent new stories, but I think the market may be gone... We are working up a few more proposals for one offs...adult, ya, and middle grade.

I tend to be rather dubious of any claim that a story is "dated". I mean, I suppose it's possible, but it's difficult for me to conceive of. After all, ideas about morality and what is frightening and such have changed quite a bit more since the original fairy tales were written than they have in the past 12 years, and the world is still plenty interested in them.

Stories don't have to fit the world as it is right now, I think. Part of the importance of stories is capturing what's important to people - and what's important to people tends to change only slightly, and the small ways in which it has changed, well, part of the importance of stories is keeping a record of that, too.

Saying a story is "dated" may just be another way of saying "I didn't care for this story--it yielded nothing of interest to me," it doesn't "work" for me."

I say, "snapshots in time".

I originally bought your anthologies in the 1980's and when I re-read them, I simply enjoy the stories. I don't try to squeeze them into a 21st century sensibility. The same with any classic authors I read, Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury.

Which anthologies do you mean? Do you remember? The fairy tale series was first published 1993, starting with Snow White, Blood Red, the only one that has continued to stay in print since it's been published.

Just checked my biblio and the OMNI anthos published by Zebra were out in the 80s and my first half original antho, Blood is Not Enough was published in 1989 in hc.

Sure a story can become dated. Sixth Sense was apparently (I wasn't surprised by it) a stunning story. It's essentially just a last minute reveal story, same as "OMG this guy is really a vampire/the serial killer everyone's been looking for all story". It was an interesting and slight new twist on the story. But now days how many guidelines say they don't want a story like that, which of course means they see enough of them to mention it. Something shiny and new 14 years ago can get old as more people emulate or borrow from it. But that still, in my book, doesn't make a story stale. I can enjoy dated stories despite that.

I think that would only be a problem with that kind of story--the surprise ending...and of course, it's impossible to write an effective, satisfying vampire story in which the author waits halfway through the story for the "reveal." In fact, that happened in one story I read for YBFH in 2007. I couldn't believe the author did that. Vampire--and ghost stories--have to have more going on that just the surprise ending.

I still love Dangerous Visions and it's tame by contemporary standards.

That paragraph strikes me as the equivalent of making conversation about the weather while thinking of something meaningful to say.

I reread The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural a couple of years ago to write it up for the Another hundred best books edited by Steve Jones and Kim Newman. Most of the stories--which I first read a few decades ago, still held up.

As you said, in something like an anthology, it's more likely the individual stories themselves that might possibly become dated.

However, it also depends on the theme of the anthology. Like if you were going to make a 9/11-inspired anthology, it'd probably become dated 40 years from now.

My caveat of course is also what the story is attempting. For me, when I read Black Thorn, White Rose, I found it still quite an impressive read, mainly because the stories were well-written so much so that they stand well on their own and aren't like some stories which only rely on delivering a punch line (whether it's to horrify or to make readers laugh for example). Or a better an analogy might be something like Gulliver's Travels wherein the political satire might be lost to modern readers, but because it was written in such a way that it's still a good story despite the satire.

But then again, there are also times that because of a work's popularity, they themselves do get outdated. Like E.E. Docsmith pioneered many space opera elements that if you read his work nowadays, it'll sound cliche. Unless of course as a reader, that's the first space opera work you've read.

And then there's expectations. When you mentioned "adult fairy tales", what was the reader expecting? Did it mean well-crafted stories that goes beyond the didactic flow of today's stories? Or perhaps something more sexual, more taboo? I suspect the reviewer was expecting more of the latter in this case and so there's a different way in which the book was approached.

Well, in our introductions to each volume we explain what we mean by "adult fairy tales"--it's not a catch phrase for eroticism --however, there are a few amazon reviews of Snow White, Blood Red that loathe the book. A sampling

"I adore anything that even comes close to being a retelling of one of my beloved fairytales. Silly, sentimental...I don't care I just love fairytales. I eagerly picked this book up at the library for a little light reading between exams and papers. Boy, was I disappointed! I felt horrid reading this stuff. I just could not finish it. I'm sorry, but I do not find it entertaining in the least to read about adults lusting after children...a theme found in several of the stories. Sleeping with the mother while attempting to seduce the young daughter. Feeling up a child who is clinging to you because she is afraid of the woods. Raping children!!!! This book makes me sad. I only gave it one star because I had to."

and another:

"Then there's "Snowdrop" by Tanith Lee, a totally pointless story which seems little more than a spiffed-up Snow White with a lesbian sex scene to make things more "adult." Such a preoccupation with graphic, pointless sex is not adult; it is adolescent. The end result is that this anthology performs the rather dubious task of removing fairy tales from the nursery and putting them in the adult novelty store instead."

Sad. =( Either they didn't read the introduction (admittedly a habit of mine when I was a kid) or they simply didn't get it.

Which says to me, none of them know the true origins of fairy tales and I find that very, very sad.

I can't imagine they would appreciate the stories more if they did know the true origins. Some people just aren't into that sort of thing.

True.

"The end result is that this anthology performs the rather dubious task of removing fairy tales from the nursery and putting them in the adult novelty store instead."

Ironically, fairy tales were not generally intended to calm children, but often to terrorize them. Snow White's stepmother being made to dance in red hot iron boots until she died, for example.

Yeah. Obviously, the reader loves her Disnyfied fairy tales--which have their place--I loved the early cartoon versions of some. But what she didn't do was read the introduction or understand the first thing about what fairy tales were meant to be.

I got my hands on a translation of the original Grimm's tales when I was eleven or twelve. Murder, sex, gore, cannibalism, revenge, antiheroes. All the good stuff. Perhaps this explains why I didn't end up writing paranormal romance.

You don't think you could switch now?

Perhaps under my pseudonym "Lairdweena Barrow".

Aren't they awesome in their original, unsweetened forms? I love them more that way.

Yeah. I was a blood-thirsty little bugger back in the day, so I liked them straight off.

When I read this anthology, I looked for the stories to feel dated. It seemed as if they should and I thought they would because they *were* older, but they didn't, not at all. I think that if their copyright dates were changed to 2008, Ms. Wessely would not have guessd these were published fourteen years ago.

Wow, it's great that a review of mine has provoked such discussion. I don't intend to defend my review in any way, just as I'm certain Ellen doesn't need to defend what is still a great read, but I do want to make one point. When I said "there were stories in this anthology that felt old, dated, tired", this was my way of saying I think I would have read these stories differently fourteen years ago.

I read fantasy extensively, in the short and long form, and am perhaps overfond of fairy tale retellings. If I had read this book fourteen years ago, my palate for such tales would not have been as (for want of a better word) jaded. I would not have experienced so many and varied retellings of the stories as have been produced over the years, and would not have had the same feeling about the book.

As I said, "It is possible to envisage them as fresh and groundbreaking when first published", because Ellen and Terri would have ensured that they were. However, over fourteen years of publishing, others have done and redone - in myriad forms - similar tales, so it is harder feel the freshness in the collection from such a distance.

I did enjoy reading the anthology, as I have enjoyed others in the series. I recently picked up "Swan Sister" and devoured it. I now have "A Wolf at the Door" in my 'to read' pile, because I believe in the editorial credibility inherent in the anthologies. And I certainly respect the right of others to read the anthology in a different way, and NOT see it the way I did. As with any review, it is only a reflection of the tastes and background of the person reading it. I always try to see the book from a broad perspective and not completely from my own point of view, but essentially, all reviews are written from one person's experiences. So that was mine, with "Black Thorn, White Rose". I enjoyed it, I had no problems READING it, I just found reviewing it more difficult because I could see the intervening years.

Thanks Ellen for inviting me to comment here, and for permitting me to read the collection in the first place!

Thanks so much for coming by, Tehani. I certainly take your point. Part of the reason Terri and I moved on to other types of story telling in our collaborations was that there are so many retold fairy tales out there now. Luckily, just as with vampire stories and even zombie stories--good writers can make these tropes their own and create something wonderful.

For me, anthologies and retellings of fairy tales never get old. Heck I just finished reading, for the umpteenth time , a pair of books that were first published 25 and 24 years ago (McKinley's The Hero and The Crown, and The Blue Sword).

Like the Datlow/Windling anthologies, those books will never get old for me. }:)

This is, after all, the person who spent nearly 16 years hunting down a series of books based only on the title of the last book, and a rememberance of what they were about, and literally cried when I not only found all 4, but in first edition, hardcover as well (Geraldine Harris, Seven Citadels series), and has original paperback copies of Jane Yolen's White Jenna series as well, as many, many other, older books that I reread and reread and reread... }:P

What's really interesting about that is I've only JUST (as in three days ago) started reading McKinley! I've finished "Beauty" and "Rose Daughter" and am now onto "Spindle's End". McKinley's author note at the end of "Rose Daughter" (which, for those who may not know, is McKinley's second retelling of the "Beauty and the Beast" tale, written almost 20 years after her first)could be a response to this thread!

I have all three, as well as Deerskin. I think the only one I don't have is The Outlaw of Sherwood Forest.

Hmm...I don't know about these stories, not having read them, but...I mean, I read stuff that is clearly dated and still enjoy it - as a reader, I'm aware of what the world was like when the story was written, and/or the writer gives me enough sense of it that I don't sit around going, "But that's not how it is right now!"

I think the only time something might seem dated to me would be if I'm reading a book written in, say, 1990, predicting what things were going to be like in 2000, and they got it all wrong or made it way too futuristic or whatever. So books that predict a future that has now passed might bring out that feeling a bit. Even so, it's fun to read them and see what people thought would happen.

If it's true that "the ways we perceive good and evil" have changed radically in the past 14 years, then authors like Shakespeare, Dostoevski, and Hawthorne must feel VERY "old, dated, tired" to Tehani Wessely, who sounds to me like a youngster stretching to give an impression of profundity.

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review of Black Thorn, White Rose

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review of Black Thorn, White Rose