New This Month: Naked City edited by Ellen Datlow

The fact that Ellen Datlow is the editor of Naked City (St. Martin’s Press) is almost all you need to know about this compilation to go forward. After all, if you know this type of fiction, you know Datlows’s name.

Datlow has edited more than 50 anthologies over the past three decades. Her eye for fantasy, science fiction and horror fiction is legendary and her name on an anthology provides its own seal of approval. Datlow understands what makes the heart race… and stop. Even so, Naked City is a departure. As Datlow herself says in the introduction:

Urban fantasy as we have come to know it today combines the often-dark edge of city living with enticing worlds of magic. Its subgenera include noir crime and paranormal romance. But the urban landscape is what’s crucial.

And that’s what we find in Naked City, an examination of what’s new and lonely in the most urban core of what we find most familiar, ripped bare here by the pens of the authors we love best. In “Curses,” Harry Dresden examines how to remove a curse laid on the Chiacgo Cubs while a vampire is called home in Patricia Briggs’ “Fairy Gifts.” Jim Butcher, Ellen Kushner, Pat Cadigan, Kit Reed, Jeffrey Ford, Lucius Shepard and others all contribute to a significant work of short urban fantasy fiction. Not all of it is great, but it is thought-provoking. After all, as Naked City reminds us, “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”