The salons were orchestrated by a host or hostess, or a particularly strong or seductive voice, around or against which conversations could play in a freewheeling manner analogous to jazz improvisations. That kind of conversational back-and-forthing, the mark of a true salon, is difficult to achieve in a collection of fictions composed in isolation from each other, whose only commonalities are incidental. With stories by 15 stellar talents, including Lucius Shepard, Peter S. Beagle, Jeffrey Ford and Delia Sherman, Salon Fantastique more closely resembles an exceptionally strong issue of a magazine.

Or maybe a saloon. Why not? A good saloon mixes intoxication and storytelling, and that is exactly what readers will find in these pages—minus the hangover. But call it what you will, salon or saloon, Datlow and Windling's freeform anthology is one of the year's best showcases of fantastic fiction.

A testament to the field's vitality

Anthologies often contain one or two stories manifestly superior to the rest, but that is not the case here. Most of the fiction in Salon Fantastique is of a very high caliber, encompassing a wide variety of settings, from the historical to the contemporary to the otherworldly, and of styles. Among the highlights for me:

Delia Sherman's "La Fée Verte," a beautifully detailed and effectively enigmatic novella set during the 1870 siege of Paris, in which a self-absorbed but not unfeeling courtesan named Victorine, who would give Proust's Odette a run for her money, falls in love with a prophetess who may or may not be a kind of changeling. It is quite possibly the best thing that Sherman has done so far in her career—though perhaps not for long, as she is at work on a novel set in the same milieu.

In "Dust Devil on a Quiet Street," Richard Bowes provides an unsettling tale, at once elegiac and horrific, about the workings of a magic ring within the fluid demimonde of Greenwich Village over the course of a number of years, and the price its possession exacts on the bearer and those around him or her. As so often in this gifted writer's work, the authority of his seemingly effortless narrative voice is inescapable, and the fantastic elements of his tale work on multiple levels that continue to unpack themselves in the reader's mind long after the story is done. One wonders if Bowes has a magic ring of his own tucked away somewhere.

What can be said about Greer Gilman's extraordinary "Down the Wall"? Her dreamlike fictions, as impossible to summarize as they are to forget, seethe with protean mythic energies. Written in a language of Shakespearean intensity and raw inventiveness that calls the early fiction of Cormac McCarthy to mind, "Down the Wall" has a post-apocalyptic feel, a post-everything feel ... yet it also seems like a mysterious new beginning. To call Gilman a difficult writer is an understatement; Gene Wolfe's work is easier to parse. But those who surrender to this wildly original talent will be amply repaid for any confusion.

Jeffrey Ford's "The Night Whiskey" tells the story of an annual ritual called The Drunk Harvest that takes place in Gatchfield, an isolated town where "an odd little berry" grows. Named the deathberry for its propensity to sprout from corpses, the dark fruit is distilled into a whiskey by the town's bartender and made available to seven residents chosen by lottery. The potent liquor sends these topers into the branches of trees, where they sleep off their drunk and dream vivid dreams of the dearly departed. In the morning, a two-man team prods the sleepers from their perches with long poles, dexterously flipping them in midair so that they land flat on their backs on a mattress in the bed of a truck; only then are they awakened. Ford's narrator is a teenage boy selected to assist in this process for the first time. But something goes horribly awry ... the rest you will have to discover for yourself. Ford is perhaps the best short-story writer in the field today, and he is at the top of his form here.

If there is a common theme to these stories, it is the flimsiness of the veil that separates everyday reality from something stranger, a veil that may only be one of perception, which is to say experience. The protagonists pierce that veil, or have it pierced for them, and a certain innocence is lost, bringing joys and wonders, as well as terrors, and the abiding sadness that is the price of wisdom.