Mike’s Reviews > The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy > Status Update

Fall'n Into the Sear by James A. Bibby: 2/5 Tone problems, not a very interesting or thematically coherent story.

The Cunning Plan by Anne Gay: 1/5 Gimmicky, hard to follow (too many characters for such a short story).

War of the Doom Zombies by Richard A. Lupoff: 3/5 Mildly funny, anticlimactic.

The Seventeenth Eunuch by Jane Yolen: 2/5 Not very funny, badly paced.

A Fortnight of Miracles by Randall Garrett: 3/5 Well-written, but forgettable.

Aphrodite's New Temple by Amy Myers: 2/5 Hard to follow, gimmicky.

The Fifty-First Dragon by Heywood Broun: 5/5 Not sure what this is doing in a collection of comic fantasy, but a really interesting little tale nonetheless.

The Boscombe Walters Story by Robert Rankin: 1/5 Racist, confusing, unfunny.

Looking-Glass Land by Lewis Caroll: 4/5 Creative, realistically captures dreaming.

The Story of the Four Little Children by Edward Lear: 2/5 Not creative, just random.

The Disadvantages of Mind by James F. Sullivan: 3/5 Entertaining but gimmicky.

The Return of Max Kearney by Ron Goulart: 2/5 Badly paced, unmemorable.

The Unpleasantness at the Baloney Club by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre: 4/5 Creative, funny.

The Glass Slip-Up by Louise Cooper: 2/5 There were a couple surprising moments, but this was mostly cliched and hack-y.

Alaska by John Morressy: 3/5 Mildly funny and entertaining, not very original or memorable.

The Cat with Two Tails by Terry Jones: 1/5 Completely witless and pointless.

The Warlock's Daughter by Anthony Armstrong: 2/5 Mildly funny, but the story is underwhelming and the characters are boring.

The Toll Bridge by Harvey Jacobs: 5/5 This story is kind of brilliant. Very creative, and while it's not quite laugh-out-loud funny, it's still pretty amusing. It does a good job of getting in and out, exploring the premise and concluding before it gets tiresome.

Death Swatch by Esther Friesner: 1/5 The attempts at humor are actively painful, and the whole premise is much darker than what Friesner is prepared to handle.

Press Ann by Terry Bison: 4/5 The ending didn't make much sense, but it's a fun, creative story until then.

Troll Bridge by Terry Pratchett: 3/5 Good premise and characterization, short on laughs and payoff to the concept.

Golden Apples of the Sun by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann, and Michael Swanwick: 2/5 There are some moments of creativity, but honestly, this was more depressing than funny to me. The ending, which is the only part that maybe could've worked, was too rushed to land effectively.

Pizza to Go by Tom Holt: 5/5 This was really creative, and a lot of fun to read. I laughed out loud more than once.

A Malady of Magicks by Craig Shaw Gardner: 3/5 This was a pretty good premise for a story, but in execution, it ended up being more lightweight than actually funny. Certainly not very memorable, and not very creative past the premise.

Peregrine: Alflandia by Avram Davidson: 2/5 This was a decent story idea, I guess, but the over-abundant description and entirely pointless dialect made it very hard to follow and killed most of the humor.