Status Updates From The Year's Best Fantasy: Fi...

Read the somewhat poetic, evocative, and elusive “Small Heirlooms” by M. John Harrison

Read the haunting “Delta Sly Honey” by Lucius Shepard

Read “The Pear-Shaped Man” by George R. R. Martin, which was relatively entertaining, with a compulsively suspenseful edge to it, but which also didn’t amount to much in the end.

Read “Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair” by Charles de Lint. It was my first encounter with his work, and I was very impressed by his sure-handed, subtle approach.

Read the Lovecraft-inspired “Fat Face” by Michael Shea, which was quite enjoyably creepy, but also a tad too florid in its prose for my taste.

Read the late, great Harlan Ellison’s grimly told and very well-paced “Soft Monkey”

Read the evocative portrait of a (probably) senile older woman, “The Circular Library of Stones,” by Carol Emshwiller

Read the lovely “Voices in the Wind” by Elizabeth S. Helfman, an impressively simply told story of an elderly couple; and the short poem “Once Upon a Time, She Said,” by Jane Yolen

Read “Pamela’s Get” by David J. Show, which featured some zippy dialogue and sharply incisive scenes, but also a premise that pretty much fell apart as the story went on.

Read Ramsey Campbell’s surreal, grim, sort of unsatisfying “The Other Side.”

Read the droll fable “Csucskári” by Steven Brust

Read the lovely fable “The Moon’s Revenge” by Joan Aiken; the not-quite-successful writing-exercise-style “Author’s Notes” by Edward Bryant; and the well-crafted, strangely dark little tale “Lake George in High August” by John Robert Bensink.

Read the very short, very mediocre “My Name Is Dolly” by William F. Nolan