Fantasy Super Pack #1

Fantasy Super Pack #1 –by Fantastic Stories Presents

Fiction / Fantasy

725 pages / 1529 KB

5 Stars

I love short stories, and I love anthologies, and I love the fantasy genre. And, boy howdy! did I ever hit the jackpot on this one! 200,000 words of wonderful, marvelous stories.

Now, mind, these are all reprints, some are classics, and all have been, I'm sure, reviewed individually more than once, so I'm going to try to review the whole book. A bit like drinking from the proverbial fire hydrant, I fear.

The stories contained herein go from very short to a couple of novelette or novellas. They range from laugh-out-loud funny (I'll never tell her dad where the unicorns went), to thoughtful, and sometimes even a bit horrific. I've read some of them before, but when I found The Moon Is Green by Fritz Leiber, I felt like I'd found an old friend who's phone number had been lost years ago. I remembered the story, and by the end of the first two sentences I was once again lost in his post-apocalyptic world. I remembered the story, almost as he wrote it, but had forgotten the title and the author's name. For years the images of the gardens he described have haunted me—in a nice sort of way.

Many of your favorite fantasy authors are in this book from Alma Alexander to Robert F. Young. There are almost as many nebulas (nebuli?) between the covers of this book than there are in the universe.

Normally, when I read a collection like this there is a certain number, say ten percent, of the stories that don't work for me, for whatever reason. Not so in this case. The whole book gels, the stories are all marvelous, and though they may not 'fit' their neighbors with straight seams, they go together as a whole into a bright and beautiful quilt of exquisite velvets and brocades embellished with gold thread. This is a book you will enjoy having in your library, to open read straight through as I did, and later to open at random for a delightful surprise visit from an old friend.

I was furnished a copy of this book in trade for an honest review.