I Read Books: Strange Dreams

Strange Dreams is an anthology of Fantasy and Fantasy-adjacent stories edited by Stephen Donaldson, entirely because they are stories he likes and thinks have been helpful and interesting to him. There’s some older stuff including a Borges, a Kipling and a quite horrific Kafka – but most of them date from the 70s (when Donaldson came onto the Fantasy scene) to the 90s (when this was published).

Some of the highlights to me include Walter Jon Williams' Consequences which is a bit of age of sail fantasy about mutinies and ship battles; As Above So Below by John M Ford about the end of dragons; and R A Lafferty’s Narrow Valley, a very funny story about land and America.

Read This: If you like fantasy stories, especially if you like some off-beat or dangling ends in the mix.

Don’t Read This: If fantasy is not your thing, or short stories aren’t, or you want everything to always wrap up nicely.