After spending quite a while trying to decide where to start with this one, I’m going to try to split this review up two ways, based on the style and the content.
Stylistically, I find the prose in this collection absolutely decadent. Vanessa Fogg is unbearably talented; her sentences are tight and often spare, but with every single verb and adjective seemingly chosen to be as incisive and exquisite as possible. Her stories full of fragmented sentences that help to buoy along a sense of otherworldliness in both the Closer and Farther sections of the collection. I also often felt that her choice of language was tailored closely to the setting of each story, so that at no point was there a sense of disconnect between the world and the words being used to describe it.
Content-wise, I fear that I’m obsessed with every single story! Some of them were funny, some of them were tender, some of them were frightening (“Traces of Us” made me cry on the airplane; “Fanfiction for a Grimdark Universe” made me laugh out loud; “Sweetest” genuinely scared the crap out of me). And yet I think that at the core, all of them were bound together by this common thread of humanity.
The first half of the book, Closer Worlds, is dedicated mostly to stories that feel very firmly tethered to the world that we currently occupy. There are references to familiar places and people that give the stories a strong sense of being located somewhere in our timeline, not too far from us either in the future or the past. Even in the stories that don’t name the setting (e.g. “Taiya”), the choice of words and the actions of the characters suggest something familiar even in its strangeness.
In contrast, the latter half of the book, Farther Worlds, is full of stories set in places totally outside the Earth we know, in fantastical worlds with demon kings and dolphin spirits and students of illusion. The language with which these stories are written make them feel rich with otherness, both in the descriptions of the magics and spirits and in the landscapes where the stories are taking place.
But whether or not the story is taking place in a distant world or a nearby one, the one thing that ties all of the stories together is this poignant exploration of the core desire to connect with each other and to find beauty even among the struggle and the suffering. I think at the end of the day if I were going to try to describe what this collection is about, that’s what I would say. Each of the stories was a beautiful read on its own, but told together they really drive the message home.
If you, like me, are not usually a reader of short story collections, but you like speculative fiction and have an appreciation for well-crafted and beautifully-written prose, I would definitely recommend you give this collection a shot.
Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for the chance to read!