Customer Reviews

Spells of the City

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This is one of those anthologies I'm glad I stuck with: of its 18 stories I marked 11 as worth rereading, but if I'd given up on it after the fourth or fifth the figure wouldn't have been anywhere near that. Jean Rabe and the eternally busy Martin Greenberg have assembled an assortment of stories themed to the idea that modern cities often conceal magic and magical beings, and they range from the mildly horrific to the rib-tickling and from New York (the scene of several) to London and Chicago to unnamed locales in North Carolina and southern Iowa. Among these are Timothy Zahn's "Trollbridge" (a troll who earns his living as a tollkeeper tries to find out who planted a bomb under his bridge), Mike Resnick's very Runyonesque "Snatch as Snatch Can" (a bookie tries to deal with an irate loser who has a wizard on his payroll), Marc Tassin's "Wee-Kin Warrior" (the story of a human gamer conscripted into a faery war), Mickey Zucker Reichert's "We Burgled It, Sure We Did" (a band of leprechauns takes to robbing banks in order to replenish their pots of gold), Jackie Cassada's "Rose" (a finder of lost pets learns that a dogfighting ring has sinister otherworldly connections), "An Excess of Joy" by C. J. Henderson (a motley group of musicians jams together to save the world from a Lovrcraftian extradimensional horror), "Stannis" by Anton Strout (a living gargoyle forges a bond with the descendant of the sculptor who created him), Bradley P. Beaulieu's "Good Morning Heartache" (a black mother desperate to save her trumpet-playing son from the gang life finds that isn't all that threatens him), Robert Wenzlaff's "Twas the Happy Hour After Christmas..." (Santa Claus and Thor meet in a bar), "Eli's Coming" by Linda P. Baker (another story of an animate gargoyle), and Vicki Steger's "Helvik's Deal" (Anne Boleyn's tarot deck surfaces in the modern world and bad things start happening). Like all anthologies, this one will probably appeal in different ways to different readers, but with Greenberg's name on the cover you can be sure it will offer good-quality work and present you with at least a few pieces you'll enjoy.

Good mix of stories - some better than others but that is to be expected