Enchanted Tales & Twisted Lore

An anthology of SF and fantasy tales that play with expectations.

In Sean Gibson’s “What’s Good for the Goose…,” Robin Hood, continuing his tradition of stealing from the rich, contemplates his next target: “heartless blighter” Ebenezer Scrooge. As an alternative, Scrooge suggests a “valuable resource” that will keep on giving. Many of the 16 stories that editors Pyle and Mastro have compiled here are takes on such familiar tales as “The Three Little Pigs” or popular characters like Peter Pan and Pinocchio. Sophia DeSensi’s “Fairly Dead,” for example, features the Snow White–like Princess Rayne, who tries to preempt her stepmother’s desire to see her dead; in doing so, she gets herself a poisonous apple that may be more effective than she anticipates. Authors Demi Michelle Schwartz and Natalie Duvall have reimagined lesser-known stories from the Brothers Grimm. Both are delightfully unorthodox love stories; Schwartz’s “Dabria’s Shadows” centers around a soul reaper while Duvall’s eponymous “Maleen” is a woman whose father sent her to outer space for refusing to marry someone. Other entries have no discernible source of inspiration; one of the more intriguing of these is Michael La Ronn’s “A Baby’s Love,” in which a faerie knight’s mission involves living in the body of an infant human baby. The stories offer a hearty mix of genres, from absorbing romance and absurdist comedy to relentlessly dark SF and the occasional bleak ending. Indelible prose throughout evokes distant lands and planets. In the case of Gigi Monique Waddell’s “Coco Bronze and the Seven Martians,” a simple scene with a Mars-based princess stands out: “The staff scrubbed the rover oil from Coco’s skin, scraped the dirt under her fingernails, made her soak in lavender and milk, and combed her long hair into soft black curls.”

A host of exemplary authors delivers stories of other worlds and unforgettable, sometimes-familiar characters.