Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsIt justifies its size.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 1, 2021
The title is no exaggeration: there are, by my count, ninety stories here, the vast majority of which I had never read before. To put it in different terms, the stories occupy eight hundred eight large pages in not-especially-large type, two columned, plus a thorough introduction. Or, another way: there's near-on half a million words in this volume.
By "classic" the VanderMeers do not mean "canonical" - though some stories here certainly are part of any reasonable fantasy canon - but "published before _The Lord of the Rings_ changed everything. The actual definition they give is "from the early 1800s to World War II", but the book conveniently closes with Tolkien's "Leaf by Niggle"; and they _do_ say "...to the moment before the rise of a commercial category of 'fantasy'". The similarly elephantine _Big Book of Modern Fantasy_, which is sitting on my Mount Tsundoku right now, takes up the history of fantasy where this one leaves off.
There are here a wonderful variety of stories; and if you don't like one, the next one will be different. The cover lauds the Big Names represented here. I will name a few absences I find fairly glaring: for one, C.S.Lewis, who admittedly mostly wrote fantasy in the novel form; but the VanderMeers have no problem with including excerpts from novels. There are set pieces in _Perelandra_ that might have fit nicely. For another, James Branch Cabell, the premier American fantasist of the 1920s. But most puzzling to me is the absence of Jean de la Fontaine, who is presumably missing because of the (fuzzy) line drawn at the early 1800s: the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen are here; why not their joint progenitor? And surely something by Mark Twain would have been apropos to the volume: "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven", for example.
But that's quibbling, which is all a reviewer can do when faced with something this massive and this good. There are a few stories here that didn't quite work for me, but even with those, they _belong_ to this gatherum.
This is the third (as "Modern" is the fourth) volume in the VanderMeer's series of "big books". The first, _The Weird_, did not have "Big Book" in its title, but clearly belongs with these. (The second in the series is a Big Book of Science Fiction.)
The thing that particularly impressed me here was the variety of styles. Of course, one can't really judge the style of a translation - of which there are a couple of dozen here - unless one knows the quality of the translator; but even limiting the discussion to the stories that are natively English, they range from the archaicism of E.R. Eddison to the purple prose of Clark Ashton Smith to the brevity of John Collier to the simplicity of L. Frank Baum.
That little list might lead one to think that this is a "boy's club" anthology. While the majority of stories are by men, women are reasonbly well-represented, from Bettina von Arnim and Mary Shelley to Zora Neale Hurston and Leonora Carrington.
What amazes me about these books is the sheer volume of research that clearly goes into them. While I'm sure the VanderMeers network extensively to have hidden gems brought to their attention, and especially those from other cultures (about 10% of the stories are completely non-European in origin, counting the Western cultures of the Americas as "European"; if you don't count Russia as part of Europe, the number goes up to about 20%), they still have to read all these stories, and that means they read a lot _more_ along the way: and then they research the writers and add brief introductions. This takes serious dedication, and a helluva lot of work.
So my hat's off to them, and to this book.
