Carniepunk

June 24, 2013
Paranormals of varying temperaments and dispositions amp up the mystery and magic intrinsic to carnival midways in this anthology of 14 new stories, some of which extend their authors’ long-running urban fantasy series. In Kelly Medding’s clever “Freak House,” the daughter of a gypsy and a djinn schemes to liberate her captive father from an unscrupulous sideshow owner. Rachel Caine’s poignant “The Cold Girl” unfolds at a carnival whose resident vampire gives a dying murder victim a new lease on (un)life and an opportunity to revenge herself on her attacker. In Alison Pang’s “A Duet with Darkness,” a mortal musician puts her soul in pawn to a fey violinist when she borrows his enchanted instrument to perform at a carnival music show. In several selections, such as Mark Henry’s “The Sweeter the Juice,” the carnival setting seems more an underdeveloped afterthought than a crucial story element. Regardless, the alternating currents of horror and fantasy that course through this volume ensure that readers of several genre tastes will find stories to their liking.

July 1, 2013
While quite a lot of this collection relies on standard horror tropes, each of the stories tends to use them well enough to keep things interesting. From the opening tale, Painted Love to Seanan McGuire's haunting Daughter of the Midway, the Mermaid, and the Open, Lonely Sea, the promise of magic, illusion, and adventure on the midways of various traveling carnivals is conveyed vividly and with striking detail. While not all of the stories necessarily do anything to illuminate the human condition (with a few exceptions, which manage nicely to illustrate the pains of not belonging and of pretending to be something you're not), they're all interesting pieces of narrative and entertaining in their many, varied ways. And of course, there are a few good, solid action stories in among the more psychological horror. A few of them, including Delilah S. Dawson's The Three Lives of Lydia and Nicole Peeler's The Inside Man, are also effective teasers for their authors' novels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)