Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, ed. The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest

Some books have dragons in them; that doesn't necessarily make them fantasy. They might be perfectly good as romances in imaginary places, but true fantasy should be about the encounter with the numinous. That is what these fifteen stories and three poems have in common: coming into contact with "Nature in its most wild and untamed form."

It's unsurprising, then, that these stories share certain similarities. Forests. Disaffected youths going into the forest and learning what they need to know. And this is not a great anthology to gulp down all at once, or by the time you're through you'll be sick of branches and vines and twee artsy people. But these stories are more varied than one might expect, too; there's Central Park in Delia Sherman's story, and the Joshua Trees in Emma Bull's, and the very peculiar forest in Kathe Koja's "Remnants." And each story tells you something new. It would be very, very easy for this anthology to slip into a repetitive tree-hugging happy-pagan monotone, and it's a testament to the editors' skill that it never does.

All of the stories are at least middling good, and there are more than enough great stories to justify the purchase. Charles de Lint's "Somewhere in my Mind there is a Painting Box" strikes me as artsy and twee, like almost everything he writes, but that's just me. In particular, I adore Katherine Vaz's "A World Painted by Birds," set in an imaginary cartoon of a Central-American dictatorship and written in a distinctive magical-realist style that is dripping with color and beauty:

Hugo gazed at her. Now he would be banished or killed, instead of having the chance to love her. But he knew this: While the ants danced on his skeleton, they would be like tiny black notes playing a xylophone of bones, and the music he would sound out from the dead would be: Joy! Joy! Joy!

Emma Bull's "Joshua Tree" captures the dead-end despair of a military base town, and Delia Sherman's "Grand Central Park" is modern and wise-ass and magical. Then there's Tanith Lee's "Among the Leaves so Green," and Jeffrey Ford's "The Green Word," and it occurs to me that they're very alike. They're both about justice. A lot of these stories have at their heart the idea that there's Somebody out there who's going to set things right for you by magic--not for free, because this isn't cheap, easy magic, but who'll set things right anyway. Lee's story, and Ford's story, both draw justice as something ineffable and inscrutable, cruel and kind all at once, setting things right inexorably but in a way that at first looks completely wrong. And that looks to me like what the essence of the Green Man ought to be.

Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, ed. The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest. New York: Firebird, 2004.