The Fair Folk edited by Marvin Kaye

This is a very good collection – not wonderful, but good. The humans don’t always win in their dealings with the elves, fairies, other. There is a good variety of styles, themes and plots in the 6 stories, the shortest of which is about 50 pages long.

I loved The Kelpie by Patricia McKillip. She is one my favourite authors, and this delightful story is is about some people in a set of artists, similar to the Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painters. It is about more about relationships and choices than the intersection of humans and the fey.

The shortest story is by Megan Lindholm, Grace Notes, showing the problems you can have when your life intersects with the fey and you have never heard of them. The fey expect you to follow certain rules after all – which is a problem in a different way in UOUS, the Tanith Lee story.

The Kim Newman had an awkward style I thought, but I kept reading it as it was very interesting. It was another story set in Victorian times, and I may have found the style strange because I have read a fair few popular Victorian authors, and the style was neither that nor modern. Probably it won’t put off most people, and I still plan to read more by Newman if I can.

I didn’t like the Craig Shaw Gardner story, it was a not funny enough attempt at humour. I liked the Jane Yolen and Midori Snyder much more than I expected I would, in fact it is one of the three stories I will be keeping this book for.

The Fair Folk first published 2005, all stories first published in this collection