Monstrous Little Voices is a collection of fantasy stories
set in the fictional world of Shakespeare, with a meta-narrative bonding the
short stories together.
The world will be familiar to anyone who has read (or was
forced to read) a bit of Shakespeare at school. All the stories are written
within the Shakesperean period, and with a similar style. There’s not a lot of
thee-ing and thou-ing to make things difficult, but the lyrical mode of speech,
for example, is quite present. This isn’t just the past, though – it’s an
imagined version of the past. In particular, the faeries and cursed princes of
Shakespeare’s works are all too real. The Faerie courts hold sway over realms
hovering on the fringes of reality, and are prepared to stick their noses into
worldly business. Witches roam at the edges of humanity, making prophecies and
generally stirring up trouble. And ghosts walk the earth, armed, armoured, and
sometimes exceptionally lethal. It’s a
world of the fantastic, the phantasmagoric – a world which Shakespeare created,
and the contributors to this collection
The characters – well, they obviously vary depending on the
writer in this shared world. It’s worth noting that some characters persist
between stories, and the authors have managed to make their characters persist with
them. It’s difficult to single out especially well drawn characters, but I
particularly liked Foz Meadows’ flashbacks to The Tempest – showing us a
tormented Prospero with a dark edge, and a Miranda who is an active participant
in her own destiny. Both feel like the flawed aspects of humanity they aim to
be. Similarly, Jonathan Barnes’s Macbeth is terrifying – an elemental force of
rage and distate; however, Barnes finds a quiet locus of solemnity at the centre
of the character maelstrom, making a gross harbinger feel at least a little
human. Across the stories in this
collection, the main characters are well presented – growing out from their
theatrical guises, rather than being defined by them. There’s a great many
recognisable individuals here – Viola, Parolles, Orsino, and so on. Each will
be familiar to students of Shakespeare, but works quite plausibly for those of
us that are not.
The plots – well, not to spoil things, but each story in the
collection is self contained, though actions from each may make their
consequences known in the next. There’s a good deal of variation, from Foz
Meadows’s complex story of family, through stories of love and duty, and into
Barnes’ climax. Each serves a different need in the dramatic structure, but
each is equally compelling. Picking up the book, I could read each story out of
order, and each one was sufficiently engaging to keep me turning pages. Taken
together, they were a narrative gestalt – greater than the sum of their parts.
Is it worth reading? If you’re a fan of Shakespeare, with a hankering for an expanded universe,
absolutely. Some segments may offend the literary sensibilities, but it’s
largely compulsive and intriguing reading. If you’re not much of a fan of the
bard – don’t worry. Each piece of work opens on a world of fae, of compacts, of
magic and blood, and affection spurned and love embraced. You don’t have to be
a Shakesperean to enjoy the new worlds thrown open by this text. I’d say the
stories within the volume are each highly enjoyable on their own, and especially
so taken together – so yes, worth the read.
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