Fantasy In The City

Hi All, I have just realized how long it's been since I've posted, sorry about that.  To make it up to you, how about a rambling?  Cool.  Now that we are into the best month of the year, I thought I would start us off with some short stories of the urban variety.  A few werewolves and zombies to get this month of awesome started if you will.  The book is The Urban Fantasy Anthology edited by Peter S. Beagle and Joe R. Lansdale.  It was one of my awesome finds at my new used book store.  Shall we get on with it?  Here is a sampling of my favorite stories in the collection.  As always SPOILERS AHEAD!

A Bird That Whistles by Emma Bull - The first story in the collection made me happy right off the bat.  We have a typical urban farie that makes unwordly music meeting up and influencing the life of the young college crowd.  The difference in this story is that instead of your typical human/farie love story, it is actually about an odd sort of friendship between the human musician and the faire one that is not romantic in any way shape or form.  I really enjoyed this different type of fae interaction.

Julie's Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle - A girl with mysterious powers "rescues" a unicorn from a tapestry.  The following adventure shows us what can happen when an ancient mythological creature gets stuck in our modern world.  This feels like a story set in a world that is ongoing, so now I'm gonna try and find the rest of the stories.

A Haunted House of Her Own by Kelley Armstrong - This slightly humorous story features a woman with an inheritance, a potentially haunted B&B, a gruesome murder...and another gruesome murder all culminating in a bit of a twist ending.  I like how this story is set up.  You think it's a potential haunted house story...and it is, just not in the way you think.  Also wifely ghost revenge is the best!

Kitty's Zombie New Year by Carrie Vaughn - A typical New Years party takes a gruesome turn when a woman with a mysterious ailment shows up at the shin-dig.  Our girl Kitty pretty much recognizes this new girl as a zombie of the voodoo slave variety and goes about trying to figure out what happened.  Turns out this poor girls ex boyfriend used a zombie powder he bought on ebay to try and turn his lover into a mindless sex slave, the result of which turns out to be actual zombification.  Perfect for a quick Halloween read.

Boobs by Suzy McKee Charnas - I love this story.  For real, seriously love this story.  Our poor heroine has been dubbed Boobs by her juvenile classmates for her development of...well boobs.  She is humiliated and upset and to make it worse she gets her period for the first time.  Our girl discovers though that instead of her period, she turns into a werewolf...so she has that going for her.  She runs around eating annoying dogs, then moving on to the creep who dubbed her Boobs.  She is now empowered and happy and this story is awesome, seriously go read it.

Gestella by Susan Palwick - So another werewolf story.  This time we have a beautiful European woman by the name of Gestella.  She met an American by the name of Jonathan who essentially tames the young werewolf.  He calls her Stella when she is human and Jessie when she is in wolf form.  He takes her back to the states where she stuns all of his friends.  The problem though is that Stella ages in dog years, seven to one for those who don't know.  As she starts to overtake Jonathan in age, he starts to lose interest and eventually does his worse.  This story is sad and heartbreaking, yet still has some great moments that make it very readable.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black - This is a short story that I think was the basis for the book.  This story however has different characters and a different story, so that made me happy 'cause I loved the book and this was like a bit of bonus.  It follows a girl who has been bitten and infected and tries to beat it, but eventually purposely succumbs to help save the sister of a friend.  She ends up a permanent resident of Coldtown and starts her own campaign against the infection.  Good times were had by all.

I felt this collection was pretty hit or miss for my own personal taste.  The stories I liked, I really really liked, the rest of them I felt suffered from a bit of esoteric existentialism.  This is a problem I sometimes run into when I read Urban Fantasy stories in their various forms is that the author's can too easily get into the urban angst, or go into borderline nonsensical.  All that being said, I did enjoy a number of the stories here, and am now going to go look up several of these authors to read more, which makes this a very successful book.  I give it 7 out 10 zombiewolfwitchghosts and recommend it to anybody trying to get into the widespread genre that is Urban Fantasy.  Happy Reading Everybody!

Thou Shalt Not Denude The Airplane's Cheese Selection

First off, Happy Birthday to L.M. Montgomery, author of the Anne of Green Gables series which has been one of my favorites for years!  Also shout out to Google for their awesome tribute.  Ok on to business.  Today I shall ramble about Pocket Apocalypse the fourth book in the InCryptid series by Seanan McGuire.  I was in the mood for a fun book and this one, like the others did not disappoint.  Let's jump right in, as always SPOILERS AHEAD.

I'm gonna try and get back to the shorter synopsis...but we will see how it goes.  Alex Price's life is finally getting back to normal.  His cuckoo cousin Sarah is recovering nicely, his basilisk project is doing well and his girlfriend Shelby Tanner is as hot and feisty as ever.  Of course our friends the Price kids can never just live a normal life, so after an expedition to show his assistant some migrating screaming yams (yes you read that right) he is asked by Shelby to accompany her to her home in Australia to assist with a pesky werewolf problem.  Now this may not seem to be a big deal for our strong yet studious InCryptid Price boy...but in reality it is a nightmare come true.  Turns out that werewolfism is actually a sort of mutated rabies on steroids and once it takes hold in a population becomes incredibly difficult to stop.  Add this to the fact that Australia is a super fragile and enclosed eco-system and BAM potential devastation all the way around.  All of this is made worse by the duo facts of Alex's previous bad run ins with werewolves and the prospect of meeting Shelby's family.  Alex and Shelby hop a plane (along with a splinter colony of Aeslin Mice ((WOOHOO)) and down under they go.  The Tanner family does not like Alex in any way shape or form and do not even pretend to try and hide it.  After a whole bunch of hoop jumping they finally get down to business.  The Thirty-Six (which is the Cryptid protection group of Australia) is vastly different then Alex's family and it takes him a while to earn even their nominal trust.  This is made even worse, when gathering ingredients for a risky partial cure, he and another 36er by the name of Cooper get attacked and bitten by werewolves.  Cooper is killed and Alex is bitten.  After more fighting and arguing and all kinds of stupid ignorance Alex finally gets back on track hunting down the werewolves.  Shelby is continually torn between standing by Alex and being pressured by her family.  An incident involving weresheep (yep you read that right too) finally convinces the Tanner family that somebody is using the werewolves to get them.  More chaos and confusion and it turns out Cooper (who did not really die) had been turned and was turning other people to try and change the way the 36er's dealt with them (up to this point if you turned you were killed).  Alex is save and the 36er's agree to try and deal with the werewolves AND to also try and be friendlier with the more humanoid Cryptids, which up to this point they had mostly ignored.  Shelby declares her intent to marry Alex...which he is totally ok with.  The book ends with Alex and the Tanner on if not friendly terms, at least better then they were before and Alex and Shelby head back to the US to plan the wedding.

Hey that wasn't too long, yay me!  Anyways, as with every book in this series so far I loved it.  Alex is still  no Verity, but he is still an awesomely written character who I enjoy reading about.  Let's see, stuff I liked specific to this book.  I loved the trip to Australia and getting to see how another InCryptid group works, seeing the history, challenges and differences reminds me that no matter what story I read, there is always another perspective.  This story really showed us in the character of Alex how somebody can be capable and trained and still prefer a different lifestyle...what do I mean by that?  Alex grew up in a home where training to stay alive was paramount, and by his own admission, while he was good (even amazing by lay people standards) his sisters where the true pro's.  This was mostly because his interest lay more in the studious scientific side of things.  This however does not make him a weakling, as several episodes in this book show him holding his own, just that violence or physicalness is not his preferred method.  This author is very good at writing characters that show a person can be more then one thing, Shelby can be hot, flirty, take charge, a bit cowed by her family, and have a great sense of humor all at the same time.  Alex can have his nose in his books, prefer to avoid drama, roll his eyes at his girlfriends impulsiveness and still kick major hinney.  The other books in this series have also shown how adept miss McGuire is at these sort of characters which I LOVE!  I was super worried when Alex and Shelby went to Australia 'cause I thought we might have to leave the Aeslin Mice behind, and they are my absolute favorites in all the books.  Happily for me, the Aeslin Mice not only got to come, but they played a pretty significant part in the book.  As with the earlier books, I like how the Cryptids, and in this case Outsiders (non Thirty-Sixers) were used as a bit of a metaphor for prejudice and fear.  In this book we saw how even the subtle "polite ignorance" of a fellow being can lead to very huge consequences...something we all need to remember.  Things I didn't like so much.  I missed the rest of the Price family (though we did get to hear family stories and also had the Price/Healy family quote at the start of each chapter) I absolutely adore their sense of humor which was soley carried by Alex in this book.  I also had a hard time at the sheer meaness and bossiness of the Tanner family, that they thought it was ok to essentially hold Alex as an enemy with useful information and that regardless of their daughters happiness their continual efforts to drive them apart.  I get what was happening, but it got a bit tedious and I wanted either/or Alex and Shelby to put up more of a fuss, or walk away...thought eventually they both kind of do.  While I understood the Thirty-Sixers initial distrust of outsiders, the fact that Alex had a proven track record and had actually successfully dealt with werewolves before made me feel like at least some of the group would have gotten on board with what he was saying, especially after he did some good work in Australia.  Also the next book is about Verity again, which while I am totally excited to see my dancing girl again...I was sort of hoping we could get to know Antimony better...she seems like my type of girl.  Overall I very much enjoyed the book, finishing it in just a few days and looking forward to the next one.  I recommend it to any urban fantasy, sci fi fans, people who like myths and legends that can kill them, or really enjoy a migrating screaming yam.  I give it 7 out of 10 binyips and can't wait for the next one.  Happy Reading Everybody!