Customer Reviews

Fantasy Gone Wrong

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I picked up this book when I needed a break from textbooks and was extremely pleased. The collection of shorts are very good, with a couple that stand out as being absolutely wonderful. Here are my favorites:

To start off with, Battle of Wits by Mickey Zucker Reichert is a story about a character taking over the story. I've always wanted to see a story like this, and Reichert doesn't disappoint.

Goblin Lullaby by Jim C. Hines tells a story mocking the typical "quest" from the point of a overworked Goblin mother.

The Murder of Mr. Wolf by Josepha Sherman is a melding of fantasy and detective done in such a smooth way that is fits perfectly in this book and is a great tongue-and-cheek nod to the world of fantasy.

And my absolute favorite is Food Fight by Alan Dean Foster. You just have to love a short that starts off with the line, "My coffee keeps insulting me".

If you're looking for a quick, fun, fantasy read, look no further. This one is guaranteed to please.

I'll be honest, I only bought this book because of the great picture on the cover - two burly milkmaids toting a captured gnome on a spit. Inside are 16 short stories by 16 different authors. The premise was to submit a fantasy story that was humorous and ends ironically. This was in part to the growing number of comedic fantasy books being published. I didn't recognize many of the authors within and everyone will have their own favorite stories. Most of them were amusing and some of them weren't. It's better not to sit down and read the whole book in a short time because you'll become bored with it. I liked the book but really lost any desire to finish the last four stories because I was getting burned out on them. None-the-less, I finished them but didn't enjoy them as much as I probably could have. Instead, just read a story here and there and you'll appreciate the book more. There's a few passing comedic shots taken at some well known stories (LOTR, Harry Potter, etc), a few twisted takes on fairy tale figures, and talking food among other things.

Well, since everyone will do it... my favorites: The Murder of Mr. Wolf, Crumbs, Fellow Traveller, and Moonlighting. Food Fight was pretty good but didn't really fit with the fantasy theme of the book. Overall, if read sparingly, you'll enjoy the stories more and wish some of them were expanded into full books (Murder of Mr Wolf, The Poisoned Chalice).

As with any anthology, this one has its highs and its lows, but the lows, in this case, make you go "odd. Not bad, just odd". The basic premise: Fantasy has a set of expectations we adhere to. What happens if those "foundational rules" didn't exist?

The result is a collection of sixteen stories from an assortment of Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and romance authors, all of whom trample the rules in their own ways. From homicidal hamburgers to digestable spells, goblin nurses to loan-sharking pixies, there are enough takes on "Fantasy Gone Wrong" to make almost anyone laugh.

I initially bought this book because of the contribution by Janny Wurts, and the concept of "Food Fight", by Alan Dean Foster. In my personal opinion, while both amusing, these aren't even the high points of the collection. That might, in fact, be one of the stronger selling points. I personally wouldn't give a single chapter less than an 8/10, and that mostly because they cover areas of fantasy that I don't particularly care for.

There are a lot of laughs to be had here, and the authors do a wonderful job of making each story unique. Consider: three stories are unicorn-themed, but each would be considered noticably different from the others.

Anyway, it's not deep or serious, but it is a great way to brighten up your day.

This sixteen tale fantasy anthology is filled with humorous satires that ironically lampoon the genre. Fans will laugh at the slapstick musings of authors like Alan Dean Foster, Brian Stableford, and Fiona Patton, etc. who all sixteen take amusing barbs at their own work. Everything is a target as heroes are psychoanalyzed, goblins sing lullabies, and food talks back to their diner with contempt even as the different morsels fight amongst themselves for gastronomical supremacy. Perhaps it is because it reminds this reviewer of the works of Jasper Fforde; my personal favorite is the nursery rhyme police procedural "The Murder of Mr. Wolf" by Josepha Sherman. The delightful jocular Shrek legacy lives in characters like Thimble Jack the Pixie or the media frenzy over items like "Local Pauper to wed Princess Penelope" as this witty fantasy goes right.

Harriet Klausner

The first thing you'll notice about this anthology is that all the authors except Alan Dean Foster are C-list or lower (Foster and Mickey Zucker Reichert were the only ones I'd even read, and apparently Phaedra M. Weldon is best known for Star Trek fanfiction.) What'll become more apparent as you keep reading is that while each author has a different conception of "gone wrong," most are neither particularly funny nor particularly interesting. I chuckled at two stories, and three left me interested in finding more books by Jim C. Hines, Janny Wurts, and Lisanne Norman, but that leaves eleven that I just read through and discarded. That said, none are particularly bad, and there's always a certain humor in a story where, say, hell freezes over. Overall, it's probably worth reading in case you like it more than I did.

This anthology was a mixture of major disappointments and a few pleasant surprises. As the book description says, the point of this collection was for the authors to write an unique fantasy story that's off the beaten path (think movies like Shrek or Happily N'Ever After). The authors could have done anything they wanted, they could rewrite any fairy tale in any way, they could have taken any fantasy setting and turned it upside down. But few of them did, they wrote completely boring and unoriginal stories. It's a shame since the idea of this book is fantastic, and with some truly talented authors it could have been an amazing collection. But it's not. However, it wasn't all bad. Yes, most of the stories in the first half of the book were blah, but further into it you do have some wonderful tales that I absolutely loved. Those few good stories were the only reason this book didn't get 1 star.

Most of these anthologies typically rate a 3 star but this one was even a little less. Great concept, just not a good execution. Skip this one.

These stories are kind of light-hearted but there isn't any laugh out loud humor here. There isn't even any chuckle out loud humor. Pat McManis and the Prachett books are the only dependable humor books I have discovered but hope springs eternal so I tried this one. There are the predictable 30's style hard-boiled detective story and another one about a unicorn racetrack. The authors are trying, but writing a story that is actually funny is hard. The authors have backgrounds like "the world's best at roleplay games", this doesn't prepare one for writing belly laughs (or getting a date for the prom for that matter). I'll keep looking.