[Update: Guran's new anthology is called Best New Romantic Fantasy 2, a much better title if it's like this collection.]
The stories
In many of these stories, a crucial part is the reader's unfolding understanding of the magical element. I'll try not to "spoil" that.
Follow Me Light by Elizabeth BearAlternately arid and gripping, in part because the story's time moves at varying speeds. At a couple of points Pinky comes into crisp focus with strong physical description; near the end the narrator does too.
Grade: B+
A Maze of Trees by Claudia O'Keefe
A strangely lovely story, full of longing and loneliness and sense of place. An excellent grounding in the physical world sets up a connection between the inner/outer realities that's essential to the story.
Grade: A-
The Shadowed Heart by Catherine Asaro
Straight-up space sci fi, of the dated variety. The characters are drawn in very archetypal male/female constructs: he large, half-machine, a warrior, isolated; she small, frail, a teacher, self-sacrificing, with a loving family.
Grade: C-
Walpurgis Afternoon by Delia Sherman
A drawing-room piece portraying magic as a charming addition to suburban life. Apparently magical people are attractive, nonjudgmental, well to do, content, and desirable neighbors. Not remotely a romance. Geoff and Burney seem to exist solely to express disapproval of (a) lesbianism and (b) magic. One such character in a short story gets the message across; two is the author clubbing me on the head.
Grade: C+
A Knot of Toads by Jane YolenDelightfully neo-Gothic. Yolen has a light, deft hand for a hair-raising tale. The 1930s setting adds atmosphere without making the story feel remote.
Grade: A-
Calypso in Berlin by Elizabeth Hand
Hand reaches back to the Odysseus story to evoke the cruel side of love and eternity. The most densely layered story in the collection, Calypso asks what we really love: the lover, or who we are with that person. Mordantly provocative.
Grade: B+
A Hero's Welcome by Rebecca YorkUltra-old-school sci fi. Again, archetypal characters, though better developed than in Shadowed Heart. Technically solid writing, but full of predictable tropes and not a particularly memorable voice.
Grade: C
Single White Farmhouse by Heather Shaw
More charm than plot. I enjoyed the Baba Yaga imagery and the overall concept, but that isn't enough to carry the story; it goes stale before the end. Like Walpurgis, a male secondary character serves as a disapproving Greek chorus over lesbianism and sex.
Grade: C+
Magic in a Certain Slant of Light by Deborah Coates
A well crafted story, just the right length for what it wants to tell. Nora's life is creeping toward predictability, psychically, emotionally, and professionally. Her regaining the magic is a straightforward story but with nice layerings of symbol and meaning.
Grade: B+
Fir Na Tine by Sandra McDonald
Men who burn, and the women who douse them? Something seems a little off in the premise. At its best, this should be a story of longing for the fire but being unable to survive it. But there are too many episodes that don't develop the story; it runs out of gas.
Grade: C+
A Treatise on Fewmets by Sarah PrineasThe only story in the collection that I think needs some attention to basic writing craft. Slightly clumsy prose and characterization. However, quirkiness saves Fewmets to some extent.
Grade: C-
The Hard Stuff by John Grant
Good writing, in an interestingly individual voice. I enjoyed the descriptions, from quotidian details to Fairyland experiences. The cultural setup is angry and exaggerated, but it mostly hangs together as part of the narrator's character and experiences. I was surprised by the almost grafted-on second ending. It's an interesting choice, to end a nebulous chain of events with such certainty.
Grade: B
The collection
I enjoyed the atmospheres conjured up by A Maze of Trees by Claudia O'Keefe and A Knot of Toads by Jane Yolen. Some of the other stories didn't seem very fresh or "new" to me. The two space stories in particular were so full of old-school sci fi tropes that I can't imagine why they were included as new, paranormal, or romance.
The writing is consistently high-quality, though a couple of the stories are insubstantial and fizzle after a few pages. Several stories have a strong theme of accepting difference. Magic, myth, and love are varyingly portrayed as a sweet part of everyday life, and as a more chilling power.
Some are love stories, but some aren't even vaguely romantic; I wonder whether simply including so-called feminine concerns (matings, weddings) justified their inclusion. Among the romances, in some the couple end up together; in some the resolution is loving but not necessarily "happily ever after". I appreciated the variety, but many genre romance readers would be taken aback. Similarly, a few stories involve the paranormal in some form, but others seem questionable. Much as Guran tries to define paranormal romance to include her odd selections, the collection really is misnamed.
In another strange editorial decision, two stories had very similar secondary characters: mature men who express nearly-identical views on lesbians. The scenes are remarkably similar. Is this de rigeur in tales of alternate matings? Is this man a stock character expressing societal disapproval? The purely emblematic nature of that character is especially clear in Walpurgis Afternoon, so I wasn't impressed to run across it again four stories later in Single White Farmhouse.
Defining paranormal romance
Paula Guran is the editor of fantasy imprint Juno Books and the Dark Echo horror blog, and not a fan of romance. Her introductory essay tries to redefine both "romance" and "paranormal". It's not an easy task (several authors attempted it on DearAuthor a few months ago). I'm more comfortable with Guran's definition of "romance" than her expansive take on "paranormal".
Guran sets out to explore both the "happily ever after" variety of genre romance and a realm of romance that doesn't guarantee the "HEA". I applaud the idea, but the execution is lacking. In particular, while I'm not a staunch defender of the HEA, it can work beautifully when done well. Unfortunately, the stories with the strongest HEAs are the weakest in the volume, laden with old-school conventions from past generations of both sci-fi and romance. I have to wonder whether Guran is trying to show weaknesses in the "happily ever after" convention, or whether she's not up to date on what is considered romance these days. In the book's introduction, Guran says she's "tried a few, but other than Barbara Michaels/Elizabeth Peters, Mary Stewart, and the romantic (but not Romance) novels of Daphne du Maurier... I don't recall reading much I liked." I think that statement explains some of the collection's weakness. (She also says "LKH wrote great sex scenes." Coming from sf/f/h, I can see why she'd think so. And I don't entirely disagree... or didn't the first time I read them. But again, does she know the modern romances?)My larger issue with the collection is on the paranormal side. Guran opens up "paranormal" to include
the supernatural--magic, the occult, ghosts, shapechangers like werewolves, psychic powers, superhuman abilities, travel through time, fantastic or legendary creatures (vampires, fairies, gods and goddesses, angels, demons, and the like), a fantasy world or alternative-Earth or -reality setting, relationships that continue to exist over eras and eons, etc.--or have a futuristic or science-fictional element.In short, any story not set in current reality. In my view, that definition is much broader than what's commonly understood to be paranormal fiction. Including sci fi and fantasy on that list is the largest problem; those are well-established as separate genres. It's a pity, because there are many sf/f collections out there; a "best of" for true paranormal fiction would be a unique contribution.
Guran's intro and her blog list Laurell K Hamilton, MaryJanice Davidson, Charlaine Harris, Christine Feehan, and Sherrilyn Kenyon as exemplars of paranormal romance--both HEA and other romance. I agree; those are among the names that have shaped the genre. I also really like how Guran characterizes these authors: as "fantasy adventure stories for women", in the style of Robert E Howard's Conan the Barbarian, with "romance as part of life's adventure". However, those authors have little in common with the stories selected for Best New Paranormal Romance. (On the other hand, I appreciate her inclusion of the Elizabeth Bear and Claudia O'Keefe stories: those are out of the ordinary but still distinctly paranormals.)Guran quotes Kim Wilkins' article The Process of Genre: Authors, Reader, Institutions (2005), which says that "genres are formed in relation to reader reception and expectation" rather than by publishers' definitions. Supporting this, Guran points out that the public uses the term "paranormal romance" in a broader sense than do genre publishers. However, in this collection Guran--as a genre editor--redefines paranormal romance in a way that I don't think would be recognized by most readers of Hamilton, Davidson, Harris, and the rest. My feeling is that Guran has recycled a number of sci fi and fantasy ideas under a different name. As some of the DearAuthor commenters said, it could be a misguided grab to get the romance market reading sf/f. But my sense is more that Guran truly believes that this is a reasonable fit. I disagree.
Grade: The quality varied enormously, so I'll average it. B.
The book at Juno: www.juno-books.com/paranormal.html
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