Status Updates From The Big Book of Classic Fan...

My first Melville: The Tartarus of Maids (I'll read Moby Dick eventually),. Some choice quotes:

'The steel shoes of my pung craunched and gritted over the vitreous, chippy snow, as if it had been broken glass. [...] where, right across the track—not ten minutes fallen—an old distorted hemlock lay, darkly undulatory as an anaconda.'

and

'But where are the gay bachelors?'

The Frost King, by Louisa May Alcott at age 16 written for neighbourhood children. It is sickly sweet, with flower fairies spreading light and goodness and gumdrops to the grumpy Frost king. The editors could have cut the last line, which appears to be a transition from the framing story this was taken from and ends the piece with a touch of confusion.

One benefit of this anthology is stories from famous writers that you're unlikely to encounter elsewhere, Jules Verne's Master Zacharias is a bit fairy tale, a bit Catholic fable, and somewhat anti-science considering Verne's best-known proclivities.

I believe this is the first time I have used the word 'proclivity'.

'Feathertop' by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Pre-echoes of Pratchett for me, with a memorable witch and social satire throughout.

"It is the effect of anything completely and consummately artificial, in human shape, that the person impresses us as an unreality and as having hardly pith enough to cast a shadow upon the floor." Hawthorne calling out the uncanny valley >100 years before the term originated.

'The Story of Jeon Unchi' for the first time in English translation. Full of stuff like this:

He flew around on a cloud again, until he came across two men fighting over a pig's head. ... "I bought this pig's head at a fair price, but this official is using his position to steal it from me." Unchi cast a spell, making the pig's head open its mouth and bite the official, who took fright and ran away.

The editors continue to stretch even their own loose definition of fantasy with what is clearly horror with Edgar Allan Poe. Arguably all horror is fantasy, but the application and intent is a clear line. Unless we consider fantasy as literally anything other than realistic fiction, it’s getting harder and harder to remain on board with the choices for this anthology. Great stories, at least.

Gogol’s ‘The Nose’ continues to stretch even the editors’ liberal definition of fantasy. It is absurd and weird, but I think in no way fantasy.

A proto-Christmas Carol story by Dickens, in which a miserable oaf is shown scenes of humanity that reform his heart, by goblins.

A Russian “fairy tale” which stretches that term as well as the editors’ broad definition of “fantasy” for this collection.

A lovely French short story about cousins singing that doesn’t go anywhere but at least it’s very short. It ends by listing three composers I had to look up to determine who they were.

A Tales From the Crypt- worthy story of debauchery and doppelgangery from the author of The Last Man.

‘“What are we to call this bonny boy?”

“We must call him,”said the old woman, for though she was but a simple peasant she was quick-witted, “The Luck of the Bean-rows, for it was in our bean field he came to us.

“There could not be a better name,” the old man agreed.’

Yep, no better name exists, that’s just perfect. Much better than Jim.