23 May 2011, Posted by Cat

Reviews

Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, edited by Ekaterina Sedia

Review by Marshall Payne (excerpt)

Cat Sparks tells a powerful tale on another world in “Sammarynda Deep.” Miriyam arrives in Sammarynda looking for her old lover, Orias. In this city, denizens achieve their “honour” in odd ways, some by self-mutilation-one woman named Jahira has hideously torn her right eye from its socket to achieve hers. It’s the time of the great water joust and the atmosphere is festive. The title refers to the Glass Rock in the ocean which devours any light that touches it. Divers once leaped from the rock into the ocean and surfaced forever Changed.

This is a fine story of an interesting people and an excellently depicted world. My only problem was that the POV began with Miriyam but, toward the end, switches to Jahira’s. I’m sure Sparks had her reasons for doing so, but I thought this could’ve been handled better instead with a round-robin POV throughout to the sudden shift at the end. That would’ve made the story longer, perhaps, but it would’ve given it more symmetry and made the switch not so jarring. Regardless, I found “Sammarynda Deep” quite enjoyable.

A review from Fantasy Book Critic (excerpt)
07) “Sammarynda Deep” by Cat Sparks. This one was interesting. The backdrop is an Egyptian-influenced port that features such strange customs as sacrificing something of great value-an eye, love, etc-in return for honour, water jousting, the forbidden Glass Rock and the Sammarynda Deep, a Lovecraftian chasm that can change a person in unnatural ways while the story concerns a man, a woman and the tragic past that they share… Considering the way the short was narrated and its ending, I wouldn’t be surprised to see “Sammarynda Deep” expanded into a novel and personally, I hope that’s exactly what happens

A review by Michael Curry
Paper Cities is an eclectic collection of fantastic stories that are about, obviously enough, cities. While that makes them urban fantasy, these stories don’t fall within that part of the genre most recently popularized by writers like Jim Butcher, Kim Harrison or Kelley Armstrong. Instead, they use a broader definition of the term that results in some wildly different settings and a variety of writing styles.

There are outstanding stories from some of my favorite writers, such as Jay Lake’s “Promises: A Tale of the City Imperishable” (a story set in the City Imperishable from his novel Trial of Flowers) and Hal Duncan’s “The Tower of Morning’s Bones” (a story using the mythology of Vellum: The Book of All HoursVellum and Ink), excellent work from notables like Ben Peek (“The Funeral, Ruined”) and Forrest Aguirre (“Andretto Walks the King’s Way”), and great efforts from authors I’d never read before, including “Sammarynda Deep” by Cat Sparks and “They Would Only Be Roads” by Darin C. Bradley.

Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy is sure to find it’s way onto plenty of “Best of” lists for 2008, and I highly recommend it.

A review by Mario Guslandi
As pointed out in Jess Nevins’ introduction to the volume, urban fantasy – intended as a type of fiction where cities are the setting and the supporting character of the story – has a long-established tradition in the literature, can be traced as far back as the Arabian Nights and appears throughout the centuries in Gothic novels, Dickens’ London and modern horror and SF fiction.But the cities involved are not always real places such as New York, Rome or Tokyo. More often than not authors pursuing the avenues of urban fantasy create worlds of their own, imaginary towns and cities the inhabitants of which behave differently than us, follow unusual rules and live alien and strange lives.However, every time a writer tries to push the genre limits, stretching his imagination to create something entirely new, the risk is that fantasy becomes the synonym of weirdness and that the story simply becomes a hollow specimen of the bizarre, lacking heart and failing to touch the inner chords of the reader’s soul.

Paper Cities, an anthology assembling twenty-one stories of urban fantasy by both well-known and brand new authors, is a standing example of how fantasy can sometimes just equate eccentricity and oddness offering little else. Many of the stories included in the volume are just bizarre and quirky, the plots are often flimsy and inconsistent,and the characters flat and uninteresting. The first requirement of good fiction, namely to tell a good story and to tell it well, seems to be out of fashion.Mind you, not everything is disappointing in Paper Cities, fortunately there are some good tales.Cat Rambo’s “The Bumblety’s Marble,” an elegant tale of magic set in and beneath the imaginary city of Tabat, is imbued with subtle lyricism.Jay Lake contributes a fine, fully enjoyable piece set in the world of his The City Imperishable series (“Promises: a Tale for the City Imperishable”), which will make you want to secure a copy of all the novels in the series.

In “Sammarinda Deep” by Cat Sparks, the characters are credible and well carved, the imaginary world is quite plausible and the story is solid and well written.Other excellent stories are Steve Berman’s offbeat but fascinating “Tearjerker,” a veritable feast of imagination and creativity and the colourful “Painting Haiti” by Michael Jasper, portraying the nightmares and the difficulties to survive experienced by an artist from Haiti emigrated to the USA.Some stories are worth mentioning especially for the exquisite language and the beautiful wording which grace plots either too weak or too obscure (Anna Tambour’s “The Age of Fish, Post-Flowers,” a post-modern vivid urban fantasy and Catherynne M. Valente’s “Palimpsest,” providing further evidence of that author’s enormous literary talent).

My favourite story is “Down to the Silver Spirits” by Kaaron Warren, a gorgeous piece with a “quiet horror” taste where, in order to conceive a child, some childless couples face a descent into a dead underground city.On the whole, the fact that I’ve been able to select only eight stories out of twenty-one doesn’t speak too well for this anthology, which remains, in my way of thinking, merely a gallant attempt that resulted in failure.