Elf Love
Elf Love, a compilation edited by Josie Brown, Rose Mambert, and Bill Racicot
I'm pretty sure this book review is going to end up NSF work, mothers, grandmothers, little sisters, the innocent, the easily offended, people who think fairies are a nice version of Tinkerbell, and people who think fairies are everything Terry Pratchett says of them in one of my favorite Discworld quotes:
Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad. --Lords and Ladies, Terry Prachett
This quote encompasses everything I believe about elves and fairies and all the Goodly Folk. Sometimes I half believe in them. I certainly would be more willing to believe in Fairy than aliens. No one can deny that I adore elves. The only plastic surgery I would remotely consider is having my ears pointed (don't worry, mom, I would never actually do that). I've been reading fairy tales, urban fantasy, and regular fantasy for longer than I can remember.
All of that said, I was mildly skeptical when I requested this book from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers.
The cover is lurid and sensationalistic, but since I seek out urban fantasy, it seemed like something I should try. Really, when good elf stories are hard to come by, one must look where one can.
Well. Shall we begin?
Given that this is an advance reader edition of the book, I can hope that the misspelling of J.R.R. Tolkien's last name in the dedication and the typo in the sentence thanking the copy editor will be fixed by the time the official print run is completed. There were several other typographical errors and misspellings that I noticed, but by far, those were the most grievous offenses.
...but on to the stories. The introduction states that they hope to "defy the boundaries of genre" and publish fantasy that "doesn't suck." This sets the bar high: a lot of fantasy does, in fact, suck, and the boundaries of the fantasy genre are so wide as to be nearly all-encompassing. I was curious as to how they intended to accomplish these goals when I dove into the first story.
The first two were nothing special- both themes I've seen done over and over again in fantasy and horror. The third... without giving anything away, the third is a giant set-up for a one-liner at the end. A very well-known one-liner. I groaned, and not in amusement. More at the waste of my time.
But I continued on, working my way through more short stories. There seemed to be a running theme in the author blurbs about how they threw together their story so quickly- and this is something they state with pride. Revision would really have been their friend. Believe me.
For all the desire to defy boundaries, they never even approached sight of them, so deep in the heart of stereotypical elf fiction they remained. There was a great deal of gender ambiguity to- I think- prove a point about stereotypes, but even the attempts couldn't disguise the gender or what the writer was trying for. A lot of non-heterotypical relationships, to prove how open-minded and better elves are. (Except when it comes to half breed elves- then their prejudice comes out full force.) A lot of vulgar language that, in most cases, seemed forced and unnecessary. If it jolts me (a reader used to such language) out of the story, I'm going to think the author was shoving it in there like a teenager hell-bent on scandalizing the staid adults around him.
And don't forget to toss in a story about how people who game online can't interact with others in real life!
But sometimes you can find a gem hidden in the offal- and this would be To Kill The Oak King by Rose Mambert. Courtly intrigue, rebellion, and betrayal make for a good story, and hers was well paced and written.
However... I find it ironic that the one good point in the whole book was written by the same person who wrote the title(ish) story. Wherein we discover that fairy dust is actually elf ejaculate.
!!!!!!
The pre-story blurbs on her stories made it clear to me that the underlying goal of this anthology was to shock- because she states in To Kill the Oak King that the story almost didn't make it into the anthology and she was forced to revise twice. But she also was pleased to have banged out the first draft of (S)Elf Love in half an hour. The best story they had was nearly rejected, in favor of glittery elf ejaculate. There is not enough sarcasm in the world to cover that sentence.
I was surprised at how many of the writers approached the topic of elf love as though it had never been done before- odd, when you consider that many more stories have been written about elves and love than otherwise. And, other than To Kill the Oak King, none of the stories were worth the time it took me to read them.