Customer Reviews

Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

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This really is a very good collection of Peter Beagle's shorter work. There is some early work here but the lion share is made up by Beagle's excellent burst of short fiction in the last few years. Whereas his novel output the last 12 years or so has been non-existent, short stories is the area where he has become one of the masters of the SFF genre.

In his introduction Beagle notes that he often has several drafts even for these novelettes ( nearly all stories here are some 20-30 pages), sometimes doing a story 7 times. He does this because he feels there is very little room for mistakes in a shorter work as opposed to a novel, which may well be true. The stories feel expertly crafted as a result. The subjects vary greatly but the style and depth of intelligence is always there.

The only downside of this book is that there is no original material in it, and secondly that many ( but not all) of the stories here have already been collected in the Tachyon collections "The Line Between" and "We never talk about my brother". This made me go back and forth several times before I decided to purchase this otherwise awesome and very well made book ( it's pricy but lovingly produced with excellent paper and a good cover, shame about the type used for the table of contents btw). I would have liked the collection to be even bigger, containing some new materials. As an aside, there's new Beagle stories in "Beastly Bride" "Warriors" "Full Moon City" and "Eclipse 3" for those interested. Another niggle I have is that the book is supposedly edited by Jonathan Strahan but he does not even contribute a preface/introduction or afterword to this book. Some sort of essay on Beagle's work by Strahan would surely have been of added value to this collection.

Summing up, a landmark collection of Beagle stories, many of which will be new to readers who do not already have two Tachyon collections listed above, and as such well worth buying now that you still can, also as a collector's item because the book is already out of print with the publisher. The collection could have been made perfect with some extra essays from Beagle experts or the editor, and some previously unpublished stories.

Mirror Kingdoms is a collection of short works, but not quite a book of short stories. Many are a little long for that term, and I find that I am not properly appreciative if I think of them as short stories. Most are more like modern fairy tales than anything else.

The writing style is loose and dreamy in some, tight and present in others. I must admit, I didn't feel in the mood to read a whole book of them this week, though that's a fault in me, not in the writing. I'm glad I stuck with it, though, as the stories saved for late in the book are phenomenal.

Lets get the main thing out of the way first: what did I think of "Two Hearts", the "coda" to The Last Unicorn? Mixed, honestly. The tone is fine, the voice is great, but I'm just not sure of the point, either of the story itself or the reason for writing it. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either.

There were certain stories that I really liked. "Salt Wine", about the dangers of taking favors from merpeople, was pretty fantastic. In "El Regalo", a girl has to rescue her brother, trapped in last Thursday. "The Tale of Junko and Sayuri" is a hauntingly evocative story grounded in Japanese myth. "Giant Bones" is one of his more well known short pieces, and its descriptions of giant life are pretty amazing.

My favorites were "The Rock in The Park" and "We Never Talk About My Brother". In the first one, a young boy with a gift for words and his childhood friend with a gift for pictures meet some unusual travelers in a park in the Bronx. The end of that one is absolutely beautiful. In "We Never Talk About My Brother", Jacob relates the story of his brother the famous anchorman, who has a troubling secret power.

I don't want to say more, because discovering the richness of each world is a large part of the enjoyment of these stories. I didn't enjoy each and every one, but some people can write a whole novel with a less fully imagined world than is implied in most of these stories. Many do.

Most if not all of these stories have been printed before in other volumes, which is good, because Mirror Kingdoms is already out of print.