Enemy of Entropy

Book Review: The Horns of Elfland edited by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman

8 June 2010, 8:00 am. 1 Comment. Filed under Reading.

The Horns of Elfland The Horns of Elfland by Ellen Kush­ner


My rat­ing: 3 of 5 stars
It took a while to track down this vol­ume, as it has long been out of print. Inter­li­brary loan was, once again, my friend. But how odd to read an actual phys­i­cal book again, when I’ve been read­ing ebooks almost exclu­sively lately!

Most of the sto­ries were a bit darker than antic­i­pated. 1997 was not such a depress­ing time to me, so I’m not sure why that would be the case.

I’ve had to send the book back to the library already, so I don’t have it at hand despite fin­ish­ing it last night.

The first stand­out story was “The Drum­mer and the Skins” by John Brun­ner. Find­ing a ref­er­ence to a Yoruban peo­ples’ tra­di­tion in a white British author’s story was some­what sur­pris­ing, but go fig­ure. I’m a white south­ern Amer­i­can woman, too. I sup­pose some peo­ple might argue that nei­ther of us have no right to be interested/​know about such things/​whatever. I think of Brun­ner as a very hard SF writer, so that was espe­cially sur­pris­ing from him. His inclu­sion in a fan­tasy anthol­ogy was a sur­prise alto­gether. These sur­prises are some of the things I enjoy about antholo­gies — they chal­lenge my assumptions.

I was rather bit­ter when I first thought I under­stood what Terri Win­dling’s nov­el­ette “The Color of Angels was about. “Just what I need to read about,” I told Sam. “A story about a woman grad­u­ally los­ing every­thing she loves to ill­ness.” MS, in the story (not one of my diag­noses, but it hit far too close to home, any­way). Suf­fice it to say that I was glad that I con­tin­ued to read.

Even if I hadn’t been happy with where the story went, I would not have been able to resist Windling’s writ­ing. She brings in so much of the world — col­ors, tex­tures, music — so that I felt far more immersed in that one piece than I have in my own life at times. She is mar­velously evoca­tive. I haven’t man­aged to put my hands on any of the Bordertown/​Borderlands books, despite seek­ing them for a long time. Now I’m adding her solo works to to the “look for” list, and push­ing them much higher on the pri­or­ity scale.

“The Death of Raven” by Ellen Kush­ner was unex­pect­edly com­fort­ing. Very brief, quite sim­ply, but one I would love to see reprinted to increase its avail­abil­ity. (It may have been reprinted, for all I know. I cer­tainly hope that it has been.) I’ve got Kushner’s nov­els on my “to-​​read” shelf, but I think I’ll move them up a bit.

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1 Comment »

  1. avatar carolinahealth1234@yahoo.com. 27 June 2010, 5:33 pm

    It’s got a lute and strat on the cover so it must be good! :-)

 

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