“One of the extraordinary adaptive powers of our species is its ability to transmute a stray encounter into a first chapter.”

One of things that I love about Goodreads is that it helps you discover sequels that you never knew existed. When I logged my review of Neverwhere a couple weeks ago, Goodreads called it Neverwhere (London Below, The World of Neverwhere), indicating that other stories must exist in the series! In this instance, it referred to a short story called How the Marquis Got His Coat Back. Google told me it was published in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, so…here we are!

While the story of the Marquis brought me to the collection, I did read all the short stories within. Obviously, they all have heavy science fiction and fantasy themes — mostly leaning towards sci-fi, I think. How the Marquis Got His Coat Back was great — it could have easily been a couple of chapters in Neverwhere itself. I also liked Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead, in which the main character crowdfunds a trip to the land of the dead to find her obnoxious sister. One of the stories, The Thing About Shapes to Come, is probably one of the most bizarre short stories I’ve ever read — interesting but treading towards disturbing. As was The Bad Graft, about a woman who gets “grafted” by a Joshua Tree. I also loved Seanan McGuire’s contribution (she wrote Every Heart a Doorway, which a lot of us around here loved), about women in the navy. In fact, I’d recommend this collection based on that amazing story alone!