ollowing on the success of his two previous "taboo-breaking" theme anthologies—1999's 999, which focused on horror and suspense, and 2001's Redshift, whose remit was science fiction—Al Sarrantonio herewith offers over two dozen stories where, as he quotes Ed Bryant, "explanations that are innately irrational, contradicting the way things work as we understand the rules" form the narrative raison d'etre.
Robert Silverberg returns to Majipoor in "The Sorceror's Apprentice," which tells of the plight of a young man who is bewitched by his beautiful mentor. Post-apocalyptic familial duties bedevil a woman in Kit Reed's "Perpetua," while mathematical magic fills the interstices of Catherine Asaro's "The Edges of Never-Haven." Tim Powers presents a formidable picture of ghosts and their demands in "Pat Moore," followed by Joyce Carol Oates writing of an accursed, Lovecraftian family in "Six Hypotheses." (Her exact title includes a squiggle in a strange font.)
In a land where humans can morph to dragons and birds, Elizabeth Lynn's "The Silver Dragon" follows the fate of two lovers. L.E. Modesitt's "Fallen Angel" finds a cast-out spirit forced to sing for his supper, while P.D. Cacek's "The Following" tracks the exorcism of a poltergeist. Dennis McKiernan tells the true story behind the Rapunzel myth in "A Tower with No Doors," and hard on his heels comes a short-short from Larry Niven, "Boomerang," with an aboriginal twist. Back in contemporary America, Elizabeth Hand details the self-destructive quest of a young woman in "Wonderwall."
An ancient curse on a family of royals is circumvented in Janny Wurts' "Blood, Oak, Iron." Charles de Lint shows how a sorrowing man can choose to remake the past—not just once, but twice—in "Riding Shotgun." "Demons Hide Their Faces" by A.A. Attanasio reveals the dangers inherent in delving into the depths of history. A strange kind of psychic vampirism underpins Nina Kiriki Hoffman's "Relations." Care to visit the realm of the damned? Join Neal Barrett's hellish bus full of "Tourists."
The lives of poor Somalian immigrants to Minnesota overlap and bleed together with television dramas in Thomas Disch's "The White Man." A would-be magician and his cleaning lady undergo visionary experiences in Patricia McKillip's "Out of the Woods." A schizophrenic psychodrama unfolds in David Morrell's "Perchance to Dream," while Harry Turtledove's "Coming Across" imports human woes into the utopian land of elves. Neil Gaiman meditates on a famous Young Adult fantasy in "The Problem of Susan." And Orson Scott Card embraces the "Keeper of Lost Dreams," an orphaned black boy.
The fate of the millennium to come rests on two homeless people in "Watchfire," by Raymond Feist and Janny Wurts. Peter Schneider blasts the lid off a cruel sport in "Tots." The districts of a dream city are explored in "Jupiter's Skull," by Jeffrey Ford. What would happen on the day Death died? Terry Bisson reveals all in "Death's Door." A perversely sweet kid's book is on display in Joe Lansdale's "Bill, the Little Steam Shovel." Sarrantonio himself explains what happens to unwanted children in "Sleepover." And finally, Gene Wolfe charts the maturation of a young boy into a hero in "Golden City Far."
Dozens of flavors of fantasy
First off, we must discard this book's ostensible notion of "extreme" fantasy. As Sarrantonio himself half-admits in his introduction, taboos in literature are few and far between these days, and although he encouraged his writers to go transgressive, there's actually little herein to shock. Oh, sure, Disch is his usual mordant self, ironically skewering multiculturalism. And the similarly arch "Tots" jabs gleefully at our society's supposed reverence for kids. Likewise, Bisson's unflinching look at the variety of suffering unrelieved by an absent Death is harrowing in its own way. And Lansdale and Barrett get good satirical mileage out of contrasting innocence and "after such knowledge." But for every one of these stories, there are five more that are actually conventional in setting and approach. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, for convention does not automatically equal blandness. Old forms can be filled with new and rich contents, and that's what the majority of the authors do.
Many of the stories occupy that High Fantasy tradition of "middle earths," pretechnological subcreations or lands just off the map. McKillip, Wurts, Lynn, McKiernan, Asaro—all of these writers invigorate their quasi-medieval settings. Then there's the rich vein of Urban Fantasy, stories set in contemporary times. Here we find Hand, Cacek, de Lint, Hoffman, Gaiman, Feist, Morrell and Sarrantonio, all doing masterful work. Some authors put an extra twist on their tales. Reed's story is perhaps the only one that utilizes surrealism to any great extent, while Ford's piece resembles the work of Jeff VanderMeer in its erasure of the borders between a strange city and a more mundane one. Attanasio extracts baroque diamonds from a Clark Ashton Smith mother lode. Finally—and one can see why it earned the coveted closing slot—comes Gene Wolfe's affecting, George-McDonald-style fable, which bears close affinities to his new book The Knight (2004).
But whatever mode they choose to work in, the authors here are at the top of their games. Even the slightest story—Niven's, say—entertains, and most do much more than that. It's curious that so many of the tales revolve so explicitly around the nature of love. It's true, I suppose, that love and death are the only two topics worth writing about, but to find the former theme utilized so forthrightly, and not as subtext, indicates to me that the literature of fantasy has entered a new maturity. This anthology succeeds, in the end, in pointing the way to a new plateau for the genre, all without necessarily being "extreme."
