THE BIG BOOK OF CLASSIC FANTASY

The VanderMeers follow up The Big Book of Science
Fiction (2016) with this counterpart anthology focusing on “classic”
fantasy.

Ninety stories are selected to represent the roots of genre
fantasy, from the 1800s to World War II. Familiar names such as J.R.R. Tolkien,
Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard, and E. Nesbit are present, but so are authors
not primarily remembered in literature as fantasists—Franz Kafka, Vladimir
Nabokov, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, and
others. As in the SF anthology, stories never before translated into English
have been included, such as Aleksandr Grin’s “The Ratcatcher,” Der Nister’s “At
the Border,” and others. That said, the majority of the stories come from
Europe or America—the few contributions from other parts of the world seem more
a dash of seasoning to avoid homogeneity than indicative of a truly diverse
spread. Some stories are more recognizable as fantasy to the modern reader,
some less so (Paul Scheerbart’s “Dance of the Comets” barely reads as a
narrative; Melville’s “The Tartarus of the Maids” contains nothing fantastical
that could not be read as the narrator’s own pitying-but-skewed perceptions;
and Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” is a cynical fable more absurdist than
fantastic). Highlights include the wry observational humor of Stella Benson’s
“Magic Comes to a Committee,” the meticulous creepiness of Edogawa Ranpo’s “The
Man Traveling With the Brocade Portrait,” and G.K. Chesterton’s unsettling “The
Angry Street: A Bad Dream.” Like its SF counterpart, this dense and
exhaustive collection would serve as an admirable survey course for the
genre—though some stories feel included out of just such a didactic
sensibility.