What is most immediately noticeable in Kathe Koja and Michael Kelly’s handsome collection of twenty stories designed by Vince Haig with luscious cover art by Tomasz Alen Kopera, is that the quality of the writing is consistently high and the range of stories represented pleasingly wide which means that the reviewer’s task is made easier than is sometimes the case when a collection is less well considered.
Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume Two includes fabulist stories, stories of pure fantasy and stories in which fantasy is meshed into realistic settings. Amongst the characters represented there are witches, mermaid-like creatures, shape-shifting entities, a werewolf, creatures from ancient mythology, a changeling, a seraphim, peculiar animals, and a ghoul.
One of the ‘memes’ in the collection is the shape-shifter idea, found in Nathan Ballingrud’s The Atlas of Hell, a gritty fantasy set in New Orleans with enticingly dramatic scenes, and also in Siobhan Carroll’s atmospheric Wendigo Nights set in the Artic where a canister is found buried in the ice. In Nine, a well-paced story about Juju with a slow reveal written by Kima Jones, shape-shifting entities and real people are engaged in battle, and in Caitlίn R. Kiernan’s Bus Fare in a creepy setting in South Carolina, Dancy is challenged by a werewolf who appears at first in the shape of a teenage girl. In four other stories creatures exist in their pure forms, as in Rich Larsen’s outstandingly beautiful and stylish story The Air We Breathe is Stormy, Stormy, and in So Sharp That Blood Must Flow by Sunny Moraine involving a witch and a mermaid. The Ghoul by Jean Muno, (translated by Edward Gauvin), is about a female creature with claws and fangs, and Isabel Yap’s elegant and haunting story A cup of Salt Tears brings to life the Kappa, a river creature from Japanese folklore.
Because the range of stories is so broad in this excellent collection, it caters for many different tastes from the visceral in The Atlas of Hell mentioned above, and Exit Through the Gift Shop by Nick Mamatas, to oddly hypnotic dream-like stories such as the beautifully written The Earth and Everything Under by K.M. Ferebee, or the gentle and macabre story by Cat Hellisen, The Girls Who Go Below, and Karen Joy Fowler’s creepy and clever tale Nanny Anne and the Christmas Story.
Personally, I am attracted to stories that are entirely original and that have no cliché characters or ideas in them, as I think they are the bravest and most difficult to write and it is those that are at the outer edge of the genre pushing it onward into new areas. There are plenty of such stories in this collection. Two in particular I was pleased to have read, are the previously mentioned The Air We Breathe is Stormy, Stormy in which the oil rig is ‘populated as rigs always are, by coarse men young and strong whose faces soon overgrew with bristle and bloat,’ and Resurrection Points by Usman T. Malik whose writing is tight, strong and descriptive—‘Gangly man took the front of his own shirt with a tarantula-like hand and began to shake it, fanning his chest.’
I was interested to come across Hidden in the Alphabet, a truly weird and wonderfully original story by Charles Wilkinson that I’d read before and which left me as unsettled and oddly tense as it had done the first time. And again, I was struck by these lines:- ‘Delicate features and enormous blue eyes, but with a sort of shivery sensitivity that was irritating, like a pedigree dog that had been badly inbred.’
Amongst these highly imaginative stories were a few which, while I enjoyed them immensely, I did not entirely understand. This is true of the curious and memorable fabulist story Migration by Karin Tidbeck, and also The Husband Stitch, a lush and strongly written story by Carmen Maria Machado, which for me is the most mysterious of all the stories in this collection. Machado also contributed a second work, Observations About Eggs From the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and this was a story I simply lent into as it is utterly enjoyable and completely mad. I found Headache by Julio Cortázar, (translated by Michael Cisco) to be another very memorable strange story— terrible and subtle and one you might recall years later. And I do not know whether Loving Armageddon, a restrained love story, by Amanda C. Davis would be called ‘fabulist’ or not, but it was again an unusual and beautifully imaginative work. Finally, A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide by Sarah Pinsker is a profoundly bizarre and strikingly different tale that I greatly admired.
