96. Strange Candy by Laurell K. Hamilton (Fantasy, Short Story Collection) 257 p.

Ugh. I really need to stop trusting Laurell K. Hamilton to deliver even a decent read. Actually, these short stories don’t suffer from the problems that plague the Meredith Gentry and later Anita Blake novels, but LKH’s greatest skill has always been her world-building, and short stories don’t give her much room to work in. Instead of taking generic fantasy settings and stock characters and turning them on their ears, she seems stuck using them the way they’ve been used hundreds of times before.

I don’t want to go too far into what I didn’t enjoy about this collection, since I do enough LKH-bashing already, and I’d rather save my whining for the latest Anita Blake or Merry Gentry. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t too impressed with any of the stories, but there were three (or possibly four) that I did enjoy. Unsurprisingly, they were the ones that took place outside the usual sword-and-sorcery paradigm.

Of the four I enjoyed, A Scarcity of Lake Monsters was the one I liked least, and I liked it more for its ideas than its execution. Selling Houses was my favourite story of the collection. Set in the Anita Blake universe, it features a realtor who is willing to sell houses to some unusual clients. I also liked House of Wizards, where a young, magicless woman marries a wizard and learns how to deal with his magic-wielding family. Geese had some nicely atmospheric moments, and an unusual kind of love story. For once, I think Hamilton should have stuck with exploring that story, rather than focusing on a rather pointless action plot. Actually, the B-plot from Geese could make a rather interesting book, although maybe if it were written by LKH.

On the whole, even the stories I liked weren’t all that good. I definitely don’t recommend this to anyone but Laurell K. Hamilton completists and very fast readers.

(Side note, for Anita Blake fans: three of the stories—Those Who Seek Forgiveness, Selling House, and The Girl Who Was Infatuated with Death are all set in her universe; the first and last are actually Anita stories. The last one is the same story that appears in Bite, an anthology which also contains stories by Charlaine Harris, MaryJanice Davidson, and a couple of other authors of contemporary supernatural fantasy.)

Books read: 96/100 (96%)
Pages read: 28,762/30,000 (96%)

Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, Anita Blake, Laurell K. Hamilton