Glitter & Mayhem
is an anthology of fantasy, science-fiction, and horror that takes mythology to
a nightclub, dusts it with glitter, gets it drunk, then takes it out onto the
dance floor to grind the night away.
It’s one of the more interesting anthology themes I’ve seen
recently, even if it is a bit hard to define. Something something parties mumble glam rock. While I didn’t love
every story in Glitter & Mayhem
(when does that ever happen, anyway?), it occurred to me that many of these
stories would not have been written at all without such an oddball theme for
the authors to bounce off of, which is pretty cool. I mean, maybe stories about
cosplaying cops, psychic vampire roller rinks, and anthropomorphized cocktails
were just laying around waiting for the right anthology, who knows?
If you look closely at a nightclub scene or the lives of
party monsters, you inevitably find a hollow darkness, or perhaps a rotten
core. There are lots of interesting stories to be told about that darkness, and
the best ones in this book do (like Rachel Swirsky’s “All That Fairy Tale Crap”
and William Shunn and Laura Chavoen’s “Subterraneans”). The weaker stories seem
desperate to glorify constant hedonism, resulting in stories that feel shallow
and glib.
There are two stories in Glitter & Mayhem focused on the
travails of roller derby teams. They also happened to be the two stories I didn’t
finish. Not that I have anything against roller derby, but both had a sort of
chatty tone that wasn’t to my liking. I was also a bit disappointed with Cory
Skerry’s “Sooner Than Gold,” because it’s an excellent story that screeches to
an abrupt halt. It feels unfinished, like the first chapter of a novel. I’d
love to read the novel, but as a short story it felt like a tease.
The anthology gathers steam the deeper you go. Like all good
parties, there’s a subtle undercurrent of latent eroticism in many of the
stories. It only bubbles up to the surface occasionally, like in the
almost-threesome in Diana Rowland’s “Blood and Sequins,” and in the
aforementioned “All That Fairy Tale Crap,” which starts right off with
Cinderella going down on one of her step-sisters.
The characters are a diverse lot. Tons of female
protagonists. Tons of queer protagonists. Tons of mythological creatures living
in the contemporary world protagonists. I list those together because I think
there’s a connection, possibly the strongest single theme running through all
these stories. Stories about selkies and sirens and their modern problems
reframe the villains of fairy tales and myths (the “other” the virtuous heroes
are so often aligned against), placing that “other” front and center, looking
at things from their point of view. It is not a stretch to realize that trans
people, people in polyamorous relationships, and gay people have also been
treated as the other; also seek a reframing.
This culminates in one of my favorite stories in Glitter & Mayhem, Amal El-Mohtar’s “A
Hollow Play.” A polytriad of uncommon mythical creatures meet a human in the
throes of longing for a missing friend. They can all help each other, but the
dynamics of the relationship create an aching, haunting sense of loss. This is
the “pebble in your shoe” story for me, the one that stuck with me long after I
read it.
My other favorites include “The Electric Spanking of the War
Babies,” by Maurice Broaddus and Kyle S. Johnson, which takes the spaced out
psychedelic science-fiction of Parliament-Funkadelic’s mothership connection,
rolls it around in some Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix, and takes it all deadly
seriously. You would think a story populated by “Afronauts” from a galactic
empire powered by Groove would be played for laughs, but that would be Unfunky.
Daryl Gregory’s “Just Another Future Song” is an elaborate
homage to David Bowie, a montage of imagery from Bowie’s lyrics with a killer
one-liner ending. It requires a certain facility with Bowie’s back catalog – if
you don’t recognize the Moon Boys or lines about sailors fighting in dance
halls, it will be only so much gibberish. Tansy Rayner Roberts’ “The Minotaur
Girls” achieves both a vertiginous sense of weirdness and a deep nostalgia for
the childhood we can never reclaim. “Two-Minute Warning” by Vylar Kaftan is an
all-too-brief slice of cyberpunk about a virtual reality combat game called
Dancekill.
It’s devilishly difficult to review an anthology. “You will
like some of these stories. Others you may not like.” I’d have maybe liked a
bit more Iggy Pop and a little less Donna Summer. But Glitter & Mayhem gets high marks for going places not a lot of
anthologies go, for letting authors play with unusual ideas, and for what is likely
an unintentional unifying theme: the outsiders coming in to enjoy the party, as
long as it lasts.
Glitter & Mayhem is available from Apex Publications. Cover painting by Galen Dara.
