Griff reviews a Neil Gaiman-edited collection of fantastical stories which fails to live up to its promise….
This review must be prefaced with a disclaimer: Unnatural Creatures is an anthology, the contents of which its authors have contributed for free in order to support the charity 826DC. Dedicated to encouraging the next generation of writers, 826DC deserves far more support than it already gets. Critiquing such an anthology feels distasteful to a certain extent: none of its failings can possibly eclipse the incredible good it seeks to support with every purchased copy. In a strange twist, I almost ask readers to ignore what follows after and buy the anthology regardless – I will merely be saying what needs to be said on a professional and artistic level.
Unnatural Creatures is a very strange animal indeed. It promises a veritable literary zoo of fantastical creatures – many familiar, some not – to amaze the reader and excite his imagination. Werewolves, phoenixes, griffins and transdimensional smudges abound within its pages.
And yet, such amazing specimens did not quite amaze me, nor excite my imagination. Do not get me wrong, these are all solid stories solidly written, and there are shining examples of singularly wonderful creativity. The anthology opens on a strong pair: Gahan Wilson’s impossible-to-title story (which I shall refer to as Smudge for ease), and E. Lily Yu’s pleasantly biting The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees. Smudge is an excellent blend of graphics and words that really delivers on the anthology’s ‘unnatural’ claims, with the former providing enough menace and growing tension to pick up the latter’s slack. Wasps and Bees on the other hand offers a quietly political insight into our own natural world, twisted ever so slightly. Both stories raised my expectations of what this anthology was capable of: an imperfect but still marvellous chimera of wildly different stories, each with their own functions, meanings and goals.
My hopes were quickly proven wrong, and things settled into a disappointing routine. What should have been a chimera was, if you will pardon the mixed metaphors, a horse of an entirely different colour. Many – most, I daresay – of the stories were remarkably uniform in truly unfortunate ways. Their pacing was breakneck, taking the notion of a short story in its most literal sense as they stumbled and leapt over opportunities to flesh out their narratives, to make themselves come alive in a way that is doubly important when one is dealing with the fantastical. However, I believe that this was only a symptom of the anthology’s greater, more central problem: the unremitting tone of fable that ran throughout its pages. Whether this was some submission prerequisite, or a statistically improbably fluke, I shall never know, but the end result is that Unnatural Creatures reads less like a compendium of the wondrously alien, and more like a collection of fairy tales that one would read to a curiously precocious child. Plots are usually simple and single-track, lacking much complexity beyond signposted complications as matters move from X to Y (if even that). One even dares to resolve itself with the use of a near-literal deus ex machina, with a divine being descending from on high to resolve every issue the characters face. There is, at least, a pleasant streak of tragedy and darkness to many of the stories: often baddies (the stories rarely pick up enough morally complex steam to escape that particular fabular notion) avoid their comeuppance, while the more sympathetic characters often end up suffering for their ‘good’ qualities.
The star of the anthology, beyond any doubt, is the late, great Diana Wynne Jones’ The Sage of Theare which, aside from being an exemplar of pacing, plotting and downright writing, subversively showcases that most unnatural of creatures: man.
Ultimately, I think, the greatest disappointment with Unnatural Creatures is that it fails to live up to the love its collector, Neil Gaiman, expresses for the unnatural: namely, its capacity to defy ultimate definition and exist in a realm of infinite possibility. Having said that, it is then truly a shame when so many of the stories that follow make so little headway into subverting, or outright defying, the most common of received understandings of these creatures. Perhaps that is the source of my dissatisfaction with this anthology. Like some wide-eyed Victorian punter promised a mermaid only to be shown some stitched amalgam of person and fish, I can acknowledge the time, effort and care put into its construction, but nevertheless feel only sadness at the unfulfilled promise of the truly fantastical.
Griff Williams
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