McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing StoriesThe stories in McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories run the spectrum, from pretty good, through disappointingly-ended, to stale and weak. The best ones are "Lusus Naturae" by Margaret Atwood and "Reports of Certain Events in London" by China Mieville. This anthology opens with an introduction by Pulitzer-Prize-winning Michael Chabon, asking "what is genre fiction? The stories in this book dance at the interface between genre fiction and literary fiction blah blah blah." I had the notion going in (which may have been correct) that the authors featured in this collection have Literary Pretensions, and are either like Margaret Atwood, a filed-under-literature author who claims that her science fiction novels aren't nasty science fiction at all, or like Stephen King, a filed-under-horror author who wishes literary critics would give him the Respect he Deserves. Due to my own prejudices about this kind of thing, I was primed and ready to find that the supposedly-literary authors, slumming in the ghetto of "weird fiction," would turn out genre stories that were actually weak and conventional compared to the work of their supposedly-formulaic genre cousins. But in fact, no such clear pattern emerges. As I said, the two best stories are by the closeted-science-fiction-writer Ms. Atwood and by China Mieville, admitted fantasy writer. And of the two worst stories, one is by a literary magazine editor, about as effetely "literary" as you can get, but the second-worst is by a writer of one of those series of mystery novels with thematic titles, about as "genre" as you can get. So. Go figure. |