The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy

(Note: I am going to try and include links to the books I review from now on.)

I only have one quibble with this anthology, and that's the fact that the title is misleading. None of the stories in it are "new"; all are reprints from another source. Some are more than a hundred years old!

It's one of the few short-story anthologies that I've managed to read all the way through. The stories themselves cover numerous sub-genres in numerous styles, from Neil Gaiman's "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Nameless House of the Night of Dread Desire", which pokes fun at Gothic literature (like that's difficult . . . the title was, in my opinion, funnier than the story), to Everard Jack Appleton's "The Sea Serpent Syndicate". When I read this story, first published in 1905, I kept flipping back to check the author's name and exclaiming something along the lines of "are you sure Mark Twain didn't write this?"

If I were an actual reviewer, at this point I'd announce something like "it's a tour de force of the comic fantasy genre". Well, that's essentially what I am saying, albeit without the "de force" part, which I think is WAY overused. I will present my critique of literary criticism and book blurbs at some other time, though.