The Silver Gryphon

Rating:
Summary: A miscellany of short stories
Review: This is the Golden Gryphon Press's 25th book (it's version of a "silver anniversary" celebration) and features short stories written by authors who contributed to the first 24 books. Each was asked to submit a story which "defines them as a writer." The result is a mixed bag of stories ranging from mundane naturalism to philosophically probing science fiction.

It's impossible to sum up this work in a very brief review, so let it suffice to say that if you like the work of the individual authors, you'll probably enjoy their submissions to the anthology.

Personally I found the lack of rigid criteria for the stories to be distracting. While it is apparent that each individual writer is good, the change of tone and subject matter from story to story made it impossible for me to enjoy this as "a good read." This is the sort of anthology which one pulls out every once in a while to read one or two stories at most, then shelves until another day.

One serious flaw of the anthology is that it lacks any real introduction of the writers for the benefit of the reader. Surely there should be SOMETHING to preface a story which a writer considers to be definitive of his or her self, but there is nothing but a half-sentence or so about each story in the foreward. Surely the publishers could do better than that for their readers (AND the writers!). Andy Duncan's story is a strange fantasy entitled, "The Haw River Trolley," a very short piece with some fine writing (e.g., "Old Whitesell knew there was no way in creation any part of that trolley could go five miles a minute even if you blew it up and clocked the fragments, but like most people who know the impossible to be true, or the truth to be impossible, he kept his mouth shut"), but after that paragraph the story becomes progressively more strange until at the very end I was wondering whether I had stumbled across a story which was part of a larger collection with characters whose lives I was already supposed to know of, or whether some mistake had deleted a half dozen paragraphs, or if the author was known for bizarre fantasy stories. Even though Duncan rated A WHOLE SENTENCE TO HIMSELF in the Foreward, I still don't know anything about his other work, and the result is overall dissatisfaction with this story. The final story in the collection, "Fire Dog," is definitely a strange fantasy, but I KNOW that author Joe R. Lansdale writes some bizarre material, so I was not surprised by anything in his story of a man takes a job as a firehouse dog (a dalmation named "Spot"); indeed, the lack of surprise was itself surprising -- I've read better works by Lansdale, which brings me back to my complaint: why did he select THIS story as his submission? While there is some excellent material in this anthology, such as Howard Waldrop's "Why Then Ile Fit You," about a senile, dying actor, I began to get the feeling that I was reading not what many of these writers considered to be their best OR most definitive work, but rather what they couldn't sell anywhere else.

I could not finish "The Silver Gryphon." The disjointed nature of the anthology's selection made reading it too great a sacrifice of time for me at the present. I have given the book three stars, though, because there IS some good material here, and Golden Gryphon fans will surely find something to enjoy in the selection. It just wasn't my cuppa.