Book Review: 'The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 10'
'The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 10' (254 pp.) was published by DAW Books in October 1984, and is Book No. 597. The cover art is by Jim Burns.
In addition to editing the Year's Best Fantasy series, Arthur W. Saha (1923 - 1999) is perhaps best known as the originator of the term 'Trekkie', and as the father of Heidi Saha, who in 1973, at the age of 14, appeared as Vampirella at various comic book and sci-fi conventions and ignited an erotic frenzy among the elderly, dirty old men attending those conventions.......
All the stories in 'Series 10' first were published in 1982 - 1983 in various anthologies and magazines such as Shadows, Whispers, and The Twilight Zone.
One thing that is quite apparent from reading Series 10: many of its authors are conscious of a need to lard their tales with verbiage. Lots of florid prose, and metaphors, and similes, and adjectives. It was as if the contributors felt that to use unadorned, colloquial language in a 'fantasy' piece was a disservice to the genre.
I was regularly looking up obscure words......
leopardine: rabbit fur processed to simulate leopard-skin
monitory: giving warning
damson: relating to plums.
mulberry: purplish-black color.
incarnadine: pinkish-red in color.
lacertian: relating to lizards.
subculum: I think Tanith Lee made up this word. It apparently refers to a room or structure in a wizard's dwelling ?
Anyways, my capsule summaries of the contents:
Blue Vase of Ghosts, by Tanith Lee: a melodrama involving Subyrus the Mage, who is afflicted with world-weariness, and his sometime paramour, the courtesan Lumaria. Underneath Lee's baroque prose, there isn't much of a plot..........
She Sells Sea Shells, by Paul Darcy Boles: a resident of the New England seacoast makes the acquaintance of an exotic young woman. One of the better stories in the anthology.
Green Roses, by Larry Tritten: a demon, and a game of Monopoly.
Wong's Lost and Found Emporium, by William F. Wu: the eponymous emporium is a mysterious place that can grant your heart's desire.........but not without risk. An unremarkable treatment of humanistic themes.
Huggins' World, by Ennis Duling: what if the characters of an Olde Tyme comic strip existed in the 'real world' ?
The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars, by Fritz Leiber: a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tale. Annoyed godlings visit curses on our heroes. Making things worse, Fafhrd and the Mouser are the targets of an assassination plot........
I've read some dire stories from Lieber, but this novella is among the most dire. The prose is so stilted, and self-consciously ornate, that reading it was painful. And yet, because Leiber was a 'name' writer at the time this anthology was compiled, Saha included 'Curse' as one of the 'Year's Best Fantasy Stories'.......?!
The Silent Cradle, by Leigh Kennedy: a suburban family finds themselves in possession of a 'ghost' child. It's competently written, but bland.
Into Whose Hands, by Karl Edward Wagner: this story originally appeared in Whispers and it's more horror than fantasy. It utilizes Wagner's past experience as a psychiatrist. 'Into Whose Hands' is set in a depressing state mental hospital, located in the rural American South, and follows the protagonist, staff psychiatrist Dr. Marlowe, on his night shift. There is lots of sardonic humor, and an ending that is both ambiguous, and disquieting. One of Wagner's better short stories, and one of the better entries in the anthology.
Like a Black Dandelion, by John Alfred Taylor: a slight tale about mysterious goings-on in the Aleutian Islands.
The Hills Behind Hollywood High, by Avram Davidson and Grania Davis: Hollywood High teen Dorothy discovers an unusual route to being an actress. This story tries hard for humor and too quickly becomes boring. It lacks the compactness, and sharp denouement, that mark the best of Davidson's short fiction.
Beyond the Dead Reef, by James Tiptree, Jr.: a horror story, rather than fantasy. This is another of the entries in Tiptree, Jr. 's 'Tales of the Quintana Roo' canon. Dealing with the hazards of scuba diving, it avoids the oblique qualities of the other Quintana stories I've read, and thus is effective.
The verdict ? 'The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 10' has more than its share of duds, but merits a three-star rating due to the inclusion of the entries from Tiptree, Wagner, and Boles. It demonstrates the limitations imposed by Arthur W. Saha's editorial stance: determined to curtail the appearance of 'traditional' fantasy stories (limited here in this anthology to those of Lee and Leiber) he winds up including too many marginal pieces, and the anthology suffers as a result.
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