Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic

In the introduction to this book, editors F. Brett Cox and Andy Ducan write:

"More Broadly, what southern literature and the the literature of the fantastic share is a rootedness in a particularity of place - "landscape as a shaping force", as Alabama native Gregory Benford observed in his groundbreaking essay "The South and Science Fiction". The Mississipi of William Faulkner and Richard Wright and the Georgia of Flannery O'Connor and Alice Walker are akin to Bradbury's Mars, Tolkien's Middle-Earth, Baum's Oz, and the German forests of the Brothers Grimm. All are lands simultaneously real and imagined, luminously inventive yet as accessible and specific as the reader's backyard."

I found this a very interesting idea, and one I'd never considered before. Indeed, in some of these stories there is an acute sense of place, of a place both real and imagined, and the landscapes of the South merge with the surreal and the fantastic.

I could clearly see this intersection taking place in the book as a whole, but not in each individual story. Perhaps this is an unreasonable thing to expect, though. Crossroads is definitely a very varied anthology, and while diversity is a good thing, it also brings some risk - it makes it less likely that every story in the collection will appeal to any given reader, and this is what happened in my case.

There are some very good stories in this collection. The ones I loved, I really loved. However, there are quite a few others that didn't quite appeal to me, and unfortunately in some cases I couldn't quite see why they were in this anthology, except perhaps because they had been written by writers from the south. The kind of intersection I hoped to find here was often absent. That doesn't necessarily make those stories bad, of course. They were just not what I was expecting to find in this book.

A few words on some of the most noteworthy stories:

"A Plate of Mojo" by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the story of a black woman who succeeds where others expected her to fail and is therefore suspected of mojo, or magic.

"Houston, 1943" by Gene Wolfe was one of my very favourites: it is a tale of black magic that reads like a dream, and it features appearances by characters from Peter Pan, Treasure Island and Edgar Allan Poe's tales.

"The Specialist's Hat" by Kelly Link is a beautifully written story about two neglected young sisters living in a haunted house.

"Rose" by Bret Lott is a retelling of William Faulker's "A Rose for Emily" told from Emily's perspective and adding a further horror to the story.

"See My King All Dressed in Red" by James L. Cambias is set some 20 years in the future, at a time when the whole city of New Orleans has been flooded. In this sad tale, a couple returns to the flooded city for one last Mardi Grass, and one last goodbye to its traditions.

I expected Daniel Wallace's story to be one of my favourites in the collection, and the fact that unfortunately this wasn't the case at all largely contributed to my feeling of mild disappointment. It also didn't help that my favourite stories were all in the first half of the book. I felt progressively disenchanted as I moved through the second half.

But I do not mean that this was a bad anthology, not in the least. There is certainly something here for everyone: ghost stories, fantasy, science fiction, horror, seemingly realistic tales, conventional southern tales. It is just hard, in the midsts of this great diversity, that a single person will like the entire book.

This was my second and last extra read for Maggie's Southern Reading Challenge. Thank you Maggie! Thanks to this challenge I read some wonderful books I might not have picked up otherwise.

Other Blog Reviews:
Stuff as Dreams are Made On