From Publishers Weekly
As prolific editor Ashley shows in this third comic fantasy anthology, a mix of reprints and original tales, humor comes in many varieties, but it's the most fragile of literary forms, often not traveling or aging well. Such a story as Stan Nicholls's "Polly Put the Mockers On" remains untranslatably British. Wizards, nearly all British, pop up drearily in far too many of the entries. In her heavy-handed, wizard-laden pastiche of Damon Runyon, "Broadway Barbarian," Cherith Baldry manages to convert gold to lead. More successful on the whole are the reprints, notably Porter Emerson Browne's "The Diplodocus" (1908), about a Luther Burbank type who combines animal instead of plant species with hilarious results, and Nelson Bond's "Nothing in the Rules" (1943), an ingratiating romp about horse racing and a rakish, scholarly centaur. Sheer silliness pays off in the opening tale, John Cleese and Connie Booth's "Happy Valley," later adapted for an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. More serious silliness underlies Avram Davidson's delightful Ruritanian pastiche, "Milord Sir Smiht, the English Wizard." In the shaggy dog category, with their punning twists, are James Bibby's "Pale Assassin" and Jack Sharkey's "The Blackbird." And Scott Edelman's all-dialogue "You'll Never Walk Alone" is the ultimate "magnetic personality" story. While only a dozen or so of the volume's 32 tales rank as truly "awesome," the laughs come often enough. Try it, you'll like it.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Product Description
With the hilarious "Happy Valley," a story originally written by John Cleese and Connie Booth for Monty Python's Flying Circus, this third volume in an extraordinarily popular Mammoth Book series gets off to a suitably silly start. It continues merrily apace with "Attack of the Charlie Chaplins" by Garry Kilworth, visits "The Strawhouse Pavilion" by Ron Goulart, and takes in "A Bad Day on Mount Olympus" with Marilyn Todd. Along the way it introduces Esther Eisner's "Gunsel and Gretel" and Cherith Baldry's "Broadway Barbarian" and renews acquaintance with F. Anstey's "Ferdie." It bemuses as well as amuses with "A Case of Four Fingers" concocted by John Grant, not to mention "The Absolute and Utter Impossibility of the Facts in the Case of the Vanishing of Henning Vok" from Jack Adrian. And before this wildly comic romp ends, it discovers "Math Takes a Holiday" (Paul Di Filippo) and "Mother Duck Strikes Again" (Craig Shaw Gardner). Fantasy finds broad definition in this wackily comic tour. While some of the stories approach the domain of science fiction, others are lodged in an everyday reality. None of them, though, fails to entertain. Together, the more than thirty selections -- thirteen of them brand-new and the balance of them often rare finds or forgotten gems -- provide a fresh sampling of comic genius in the sphere of fantasy fiction and a wide range of tales to suit every taste in humor.
