THE FAIR FOLK is a themed anthology edited by Marvin Kaye and commissioned by the Science Fiction Book Club. Each of the six stories in the book was required to be novella-length and feature an elf as the central character. Now that idea itself seems a bit fey to me (ba dum bum bum), but let’s see what we have in store.

We lead off with noted fantasist Tanith Lee’s “UOUS,” a mischievous retelling of the traditional “three wishes to be granted” fairy-tale meme. This story has a tricky start where the edges of fantasy and reality are quite blurred, and probably intentional, but this doesn’t allow the reader to get into the tale until at least 10 or 15 pages have been read. Lee’s thick descriptions (even using synaesthetic descriptions of smells as colors, peculiarly apt for the elfin world) are beautiful, and the weary, knowing tone of her protagonist also plays well in this opening salvo.

Megan Lindholm contributes a wonderful piece (“Grace Notes”) on how an old-school domestic brownie might fit into the average 21st century of a single male. It’s kind of funny, definitely unsettling and very adept at working all the loose ends into a lovely package for the finale.

This is followed by two pieces of Victorian or Edwardian-era fiction. Kim Newman’s “The Gypsies in the Wood” features the machinations of the Diogenes Club, a British quasi-governmental group devoted to dealing with unusual phenomena. This particular adventure concerns the passageways between the traditional world of the humans and the fairyland of the others, and how those passageways can conceal quite a bit of evil. Patricia A. McKillip’s “The Kelpie” is an intriguing story of an artist’s colony encounter with the mythical beast. It’s the kind of story that could have been written during that remarkable evening of storytelling, which brought forth Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN. But of the two stories that take this vein, Newman’s is much stronger and darker, proving that even if everything looks fine on the outside, everyone is eventually scarred by contact with the world of the fair folk.

Craig Shaw Gardner’s “An Embarrassment of Elves” proceeds with a lighter touch and does have its moments of humor situated within a large party thrown by the elves, but much of the charm is mitigated by the ridiculous names he insists on giving characters, such as Dadooronron, Shamalama and Ding Dong.

The book rounds up with perhaps the best piece of all, Jane Yolen and Midori Snyder’s “Except the Queen,” an epistolary novella that is carried out between two elven sisters, who have been banished from their homeland. The letters attempt to explore the cause of their banishment, their unsuitableness for the iron-bound world of the humans and their desire to return home. In the course of their exchange, they find a new reason to live in relationships they make with those on the outside, and those individuals come from some surprising background themselves.

All in all, an excellent anthology with no real clinkers, and even certain thudding moments in some stories can be overlooked because the quality of writing is consistently high. It’s not all fey or Dungeons & Dragons style, but it is a diverse look at Elfenland, and brownies and sprites and all the other fair folk. And that means it’s probably worth a spot on your shelf devoted to such marvelous creatures. –Mark Rose

Buy it at SFBC.