LOCUS Year in Review praises books by Peter S. Beagle, Ellen Klages, James Morrow, and Jane Yolen
The February LOCUS features Best of the Year essays by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe. The duo sing the praises of Peter S. Beagle’s IN CALABRIA and THE OVERNEATH, Ellen Klages’ WICKED WONDERS, James Morrow’s and Jane Yolen’s THE EMERALD CIRCUS. Along the way, they also recommend titles by several Tachyon contributors: Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory, The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley, The Moon and the Other by John Kessel, Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R. Kiernan, Passing Strange by Ellen Klages, and Borne by Jeff VanderMeer.
From Jonathan Strahan:
I also loved Ellen Klages’s WICKED WONDERS. I am perhaps biased, having been the commissioning editor on a number of These stories, but new novelette “Woodsmoke” is a highlight of the year, even if it’s not genre at all, and the rest of the stories are as good.
Also highly recommended are Peter S. Beagle’s THE OVERNEATH, and Jack Dann’s Camp Concentration, which was published on the cusp of the new year and featured Dann’s harrowing Holocaust stories.
Even SF’s master satirist James Morrow riffed on a source text – in this case a classic expressionist movie – in his characteristically acerbic and often hilarious novella THE ASYLUM OF DR. CALIGARI, although the focus isn’t on the film so much as on the early days of modernist art.
Early in the year, Ellen Klages produced her finest work for adults, Passing Strange, a seamless mix of meticulous San Francisco history, pulp art, queer romance, and magical women, following this later in the year with her delightful second collection, WICKED WONDERS. Jeffrey Ford brought his acute sense of character and place to the haunted house tale in The Twilight Pariah, while Peter Beagle continued a string of subtly magical novellas with IN CALABRIA.
Those collections by Klages, Rowe, and Samatar were among the most noteworthy of the year, and to them we should add Jane Yolen’s THE EMERALD CIRCUS, her first adult collection in 17 years, in which she revisits classic stories and writers from Hans Christian Andersen to Peter Pan (in her classic “Lost Girls”), Emily Dickinson, and even Geoffrey of Monmouth. Peter Beagle, in his collection THE OVERNEATH, revisits some of his past hits, with two stories about Schmendrick, others about different varieties of unicorns, and one from the world of The Innkeeper’s Song, though probably the best story is the original fairy tale “The Queen Who Could Not Walk”.
For more info on WICKED WONDERS, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
For more info on THE OVERNEATH, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
For more info on THE ASYLUM OF DR. CALIGARI, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Elizabeth Story
For more info about IN CALABRIA, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
For more info on THE EMERALD CIRCUS, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
