Customer Reviews

The Poison Eaters: and Other Stories

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a wonderful collection of short stories by Holly Black. The stories span everything from faeries to a girl challenging the devil to an eating contest. Holly Black's diversity as an author, and her skill, is exceedingly pleasurable to encounter. One of her characters states: "It was readers that needed to be protected, he thought. Books were something that happened to readers. Readers were the victims of books." If that is truly the case, this is a great book by which to be victimized.

The collection of stories includes:

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
A Reversal of Fortune
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
The Night Market
The Dog King
Virgin
In Vodka Veritas
The Coat of Stars
Paper Cuts Scissors
Going Inside
The Land of Heart's Desire
The Poison Eaters

Most of these stories were previously published, but there are two new stories specifically crafted for this collection. These stories have an extremely dark edge and yet a poetic and often amazing sense of what it is to be human, and an assessment of humanity. If readers can be victimized by books, then they will be by this one. It will be an addiction that they cannot put down and one that will leave them wanting another fix.
Exquisit

This book is a collection of Holly Black's short stories. Overall it is a decent collection. It you are a huge Holly Black fan, like I am, beware that many of these stories appear in other anthologies. So, I had already read some of them. There is a nice publication history in the back of the book just in case you want to check and see which stories you may have already read.

The stories tend to be dark and follow paranormal/urban fantasy themes. Most of the stories are a bit ironic and have some sense of dark humor to them. There are a number of stories that touch on fairies, a couple that touch on werewolves, a story that deals with characters in books coming alive, one that deals with vampires, and a couple that deal with mythology. There is one story that takes place in the world that Black's Modern Tales of Fairie is in. There are twelve stories in all, they vary quite a bit in length.

I tended to like the stories towards the back of the book better. Among my favorites were: The Night Market about a girl who saves her sister from a fairy by braving the strange Night Market, Virgin a story about unicorns, The Coat of Stars a story about a costume designer fighting the fairy Queen for his lover's return, Paper Cuts Scissors at story about characters coming out of books and mingling, and The Poison Eaters a story about poisonous sisters.

There were also some stories that were a bit weak. The Land of Heart's Desire, which uses the characters from the Tithe series, wasn't the most interesting.

Overall though I enjoyed the majority of stories and am glad I read the book. It is a quick read, but if you are a Holly Black fan...or an urban fantasy fan in general you should enjoy this collection. Now I am looking forward to reading the start of Black's Curse Worker series "The White Cat".

Dark and delightful, cleverly written as always, in small but satisfying bite sizes. Black is truly a weaver of modern, dark fairytale and I think that's when I like her best. In a literary world where modern supernatural often revolves around a romance story too closely, seeing stories like this are sweet, dark relief.

I wasn't blown away by any of the stories in this book, and I don't think they'll make me want to search out the author's other works. Some were entertaining and creepy and thought provoking, and fans of Holly Black or urban fantasy in general would probably find something to like.

However, if things like typos, extra words, tense switches, and stories that can't keep their characters' names straight from one paragraph to the next drive you crazy, you might want to give this one a pass. I don't think I've ever seen such bad editing, even in some of the self-published books I've read. It's even less forgivable since this is a compilation of previously published stories. It looks like nobody could be bothered to give the book a basic once-over before it went to press. That's a shame, because it makes me think the publisher doesn't care... and if they don't care enough to do a basic edit to fix the mistakes, why should I care enough to give them my money?

Creepy tales of girls whose kisses will kill you. Vampires who are stalking the night. Fairies that want to keep you forever. This is a collection you won't want to miss if you're a fan of Holly Black or things that go bump in the night and day.

This was a great collection there were only a couple of stories in this that were previously unpublished, but I had not read any of them. It was a real treat. They will all sort of dark, almost spooky tales of all sorts of odd things. I didn't like the story "Virgin," which was too bad because it was about unicorns. I just found it to be a bit hard to follow. I was never really sure what the characters were doing. My three favorite though were "The Night Market," "The Coat of Stars" and "Paper Cuts Scissors." "The Night Market" had a sort of voodoo feel to it. I liked the idea of a fairy in a tree that makes you fall in love with it. It's perfectly mischievous. "The Coat of Stars" was about a boy who's boyfriend got taken by fairies when they were teens. He comes back and makes these beautiful garments to try to entice the fairies into letting his boyfriend go. I thought it was a sweet story and I loved the main character. "Paper Cuts Scissors" I love because I love books, and the Dewey decimal system. In this story, the book characters intermingled within each other's stories, causing all sorts of interesting twists in the classics. The main characters girlfriend has a way of being able to put things in books, and eventually folds herself into one. I loved the whole concept of this story, and would love to see more added to it, or maybe have a short story collection on altered classics. All in all this was a fantastic little collection, and I recommend it highly to fans of the genre and Holly's other work.

First Line:
"Matilda was drunk, but she was always drunk anymore."


Favorite Lines:
"'Mayhaps.' Roiben tried not to let anything show on his face."

I originally borrowed and read the book from my local library. I really enjoyed it...particularly the title story...it is sad and dark, but sweet in it's own way. Holly Black does a good job giving the reader a mix of different mystical-creature based stories (12 in all), from vampires, to werewolves, to faeries, to ghosts. I find myself coming back time and time again for a quick read.

I love Holly Black's imagination, I read her series: Tithe, Valiant and Ironside, and I really enjoyed them, so when I found out that she was writing The Poison Eaters and other stories, I couldn't wait to read them.
But, when I get the book, I was a bit disappointed, I didn't find the stories as compelling as the series.
The main story "The Poison Eaters" is nice but I feel there is something missing, a lack of substance, for the whole story, so I just read two more and then put down the book. I still want to give Black another chance so I will read the book again later, but that never happened to me with Tithe, which I have read four times now.
Anyway if you are a fan of Black's work, you can risk and buy this book, it still have great ideas, but I think that Black is better with long stories, so I hope that the Curse Workers series are as good as her first books.

Ummmm...this stories totally rocked my socks off!!! I loved reading each and every single one. They all held a significance of someone getting back at someone. Basically, what goes around comes around. I loved that each story is unique. There were fairies, unicorns, etc. So much goodness.

I am hoping to see if Ms. Black will continue any of the stories into a full novel. Which anyone she picks, if she does I know for sure I will be dying to read. This a great book with strong characters and plots you will never forget.

I preface this by saying that my previous exposure to short stories was about the bare minimum you would expect from someone with an English degree. As I want to write novels, I focused mostly on studying novels. One creative writing professor forced me to expand my horizons. I've read some Alice Munro, some of Junot Diaz's Drown, and though I am aware that I read more authors' works for class assignments, those were the only two authors whose names immediately spring to mind. You see, the short story is a tricky thing, and I think people expect different things from them. I can already tell you that I liked Munro and Diaz because they were the only authors this one professor assigned that I thought gave me a complete story that was nuanced, but didn't make me read the same page fifteen times just to figure out what the hell was going on.

Short stories can be many things-- snapshots that give us deep insight into a character's mind, legends reminiscent of the stories our parents told us a million times, the exact moment that things went wrong and why. Black delivers all of these in The Poison Eaters. Some of the highlights for me were:

"The Coldest Girl in Coldtown"
I was blown away by the first story in the collection. I mean, I was already amazed by White Cat, but in this short story Black showed me that my utter fangirly devotion is not misplaced. In 28 pages, Black somehow manages to create a whole world dealing with the aftermath of a vampire-plague AND deliver a plot. Again, that's in 28 pages. The narrator explains the surroundings to the reader, but it doesn't feel forced. I was sad when the story ended, because I could have easily read a whole novel about that world. If you like the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld, make sure to check this story out.

"The Coat of Stars"
This story was one of my favorites because the entire tone of the story shifted about halfway through. In the beginning of the story, we follow the main character as he navigates a family gathering (which is a little awkward, as he is gay and VERY closeted about it around his Hispanic, urban family). By the middle of the story, however, the story has morphed into a story based on a classic fairy tale structure: the hero tailor must make three beautiful garments to convince the fairy queen to release his love. As disjointed as the two concepts seem, Black weaves them together so smoothly that I didn't even notice the transition until we were on the second coat.

"The Land of Heart's Desire"
This was my favorite story in the whole collection (though the above two were 2nd and 3rd place). This is exactly how I like my short story: a snapshot of someone's day that shows us what makes them tick. This story is urban fantasy bordering on magical realism-- the setting is a little cafe in a city (that I am presuming is New York) run by a pixie named Kaye and her best friend. Our protagonist is Kaye's boyfriend Roiben, the King of the Unseelie (Fairy) court, who is roped into working at the cafe while he waits for Kaye. From here, we see Roiben contemplate his relationship with Kaye, including why exactly it is he's willing to debase himself like this for her.
Also, I am kind of under the impression that Tithe is going to be set in this space and with these characters as well... GoodReads tells me that the main characters of that book are also called Kaye and Roiben... Oh dear. I hope I haven't accidentally spoiled something for myself. On the other hand, even if I did, I'm kind of just glad I get to go back into that story. I will keep you posted, as Tithe is slated for review next week.

Rating: 4 stars (I really liked it and think that urban fantasy fans will love it. I'm still not sure how I feel about short stories in general though. I especially think I need to expand my reading of current, YA short stories, as all of my other experience has been a little snobishly high-brow.)

Most of these stories appear in other anthologies. Some of them a humorous. Most of them are on the dark side. Maybe that is what I liked about them. My favorites by far were "The Night Market" where we discover what love really is and at what length we will go to obtain it," The Coldest Girl in Coldtown" a twisted vampire story, "The Poison Eaters" a story of revenge, and "A Reversal of Fortune" a story of beating the Devil at his own game. This book has something for everyone. Not all of the stories were as good as I would have liked. I will say there was enough here for everyone to find something for their taste in short stories.