The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

Reading multi-author anthologies is always a frustrating experience for me, because of having to reset my expectations at the beginning of every single story. I can't just settle into the book, because the book changes after each story. It's more than just having to settle into a new story, it's about what I should expect about the story given the author. Because different authors are, well, different, and I need to figure out whether I should be prepared to face -isms in the story, and whether it's the sort of story that'll likely end on a hopeful note, and what kinds of things the author thinks are important or interesting to focus on, and so on and so forth. It can get kind of exhausting! Basically it comes down to: do I trust this author to tell me a story I will enjoy? And I HAVE NO IDEA whether to trust the author or not because I don't have any prior experience to draw on!

All of which is to say that I found this anthology, like any multi-author anthology, very uneven. Let me go through story-by-story:

( Mostly no spoilers. Does spoiler the end of one story, Screaming for Fairies )