THE SUNBIRD
THE MANTICORE
THE WEREWOLF
THE GRIFFIN
Welcome to a menagerie unlike any other, where stories let AMAZING, BEAUTIFUL and occasionally TERRIFYING creatures roam free in your mind.
This is Neil Gaiman's selection of his favourite stories featuring beasts from myth, fable and imagination. Creatures extraordinary, exotic, extinct, living, dead and undead prowl the pages of this book.
BE VERY, VERY CAREFUL IF YOU INSIST ON OPENING IT.
This is quite a long anthology, but it also contains a few re-publish stories but it writers that audiences are unlikely to be familiar with due to a lot of them being dead or just real old. The illustrations that each story has are pretty good and the formating works well.
Intro by Neil Gaiman, 5/5 stars for being a introduction.
1.
by Gahan Wilson: This was a fun creepy idea, where a stain antagonizes rich people. There's more to the story but I'm not explaining it (well). The way its incorporated into the actual text is cool. 4/5 Stars for poor butlers. 2.The Cartographer Wasps and The Anarchist Bees by E. Lily Yu: This one was weird, but also great. It's like a politician fable with insects . 4/5 stars for short lives of Bees.
3.The Griffin and The Minor Canon by Frank R.Stockton: This is a story says to be a bad person. Unless people treat you terrible. This writer is dead and this story must have appeared somewhere. 4/5 stars for Tiny Griffins.
4.Ozioma The Wicked by Nnedi Okorafor: A young Nigerian girl can speak to snakes and her community hate her for it until she usefully. 4/5 stars for Brest like waves.
5. Sunbird by Neil Gaiman: This reminds me of that the ep of Angel with the werewolf. It doesn't have a werewolf in it. A society of trying rare foods go after the last thing they haven't tried. 4/5 stars for two feathers.
6. The Sage of Theare by Diana Wynne Jones: This is another story by a dead writer and has character that appears in other works. The creature is an water dragon or something. Is a god a creature? This is a saga of short story, it was good. 4/5 stars for steaming gods.
7. Gabriel - Ernest by Saki: I think this is a story I've read before, but I thought the ending was different. Maybe Mandela effect or I've combined in my head with something else. If anyone wants to tell me what "He had suffered bittern in his study" means, feel free. This is a werewolf story which would have been a spoiler is wasn't so obvious what it was to a modern reader. 4/5 stars for missing sheep.
8. The Cockatoucan by E. Nesbit:I own a collection of Nesbit's stories, mainly because I liked her name and it has a skull on the cover. This is basically Alice in Underland nonsense. Basically, random magic and skinny people are bitter. 4/5 stars for missed omnibuses.
9. Moveable Beast by Maria Dahvana Headley: I liked this story. Set in somewhere in America I guess, called Bastardville so fun. The "villain" is immediately unlikable. Because if someone asked for you to smile (and they're not taking a picture) they're a dick. Also Scottish connection which is fun and fitting. 4/5 stars for Ice Cream insults.
10.The Flight of The Horse by Larry Niven: This involves time travelling to find a horse with a twist so fun. Also another dead writer. 3/5 stars for made gems.
11.Prismatica by Samuel R. Delaney: This your usual quest story, with trickster and princesses. It was long enough to have chapters. There's also a unicorn and a thing in a box. 3/5 stars for my nearest and dearest friends.
12.The Manticore, The Mermaid, and Me by Megan Kurashige: This one is weird. We're back to stories that were written for this book, which two stories ago but feels long. This plays with known hoaxes or are they hoaxes. I would have liked better description of the creatures. The idea was cool. 4/5 stars for museum pass.
13.The Compleat Werewolf by Anthony Boucher: This is 80 pages long and some what mature. It was clearly written for an adult audience, not that really matters since this is YA aimed anthology. It just weird having a protagonist that is a hairy German Professor, obsessing over an ex-student. The earliest publication date I can find for this is1969, though I wonder if it was earlier than (that cause it was 1942). 4/5 stars for Communist Allegory.
14.The Smile on the Face by Nalo Hopkinson: This involves trees and negative body image. I wasn't aware of the myth this was based on, which is cool. 4/5 stars for cherry pits. (TW: Sexual Assault).
15.Or All the Seas with Oysters by Avram Davidson: Beware of bicycles. This was a cool idea from 1958. 4/5 stars for pins.
16.Come Lady Death by Peter S. Beagle: The Last Unicorn writer brings us a story about death, so fun. Also a party. I like the idea, but it's can 4/5 stars for bad wine.
Overall, I give this book 4/5 stars for monster encounters. I like the diversity with the writers and the creatures they bring with them. Out of the 16 story, only 2 were unique to this collection, but it does show a big variety for authors to discover that older and were my first time reading them most of them so I get the effect to show older work to a younger generation. It was a pretty cool collection, with solid stories. I would recommend if like monsters and short stories or if you want to discover some new, old writers to check out.
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