Reviews

• Absolutely stunning collection of dark short stories. Priya Sharma is one to watch out for, and I cannot wait to see if she is releasing a full length novel. I loved everything about this book; the dark themes, the imagery, the twists in the end that you don't see coming. This is the kind of book that simultaneously makes me want to give up writing forever, as I could never write anything so good, and pushes me on to write better.

• Written in an elegant and almost poetic style, these stories are particularly suitable for a deep and thoughtful reading, and not for a quick and easy one. That it’s precisely where the whole allure and all the richness of this book lie. The themes of these stories are the diversity, the search for identity, the survival, the difficult relationship with other people, parenthood and the sense of guilt. The deep concept of “monstrosity” has a very broad spectrum and includes both the animal otherness and the human bestiality. Here have the protagonists a very deep connection with reptiles or birds (and/or insects) or with sea creatures. The author deals with important social themes, which are then projected in a dimension “at the edge of reality”, in the broadest sense of this expression. I highly recommend it!

• These are great stories teeming with originality and surprises. An author to follow.

• This will be a very short review. I will be brutally frank. I have been in love with the lyrical writing of Priya Sharma since I first read her work "The Fox Maiden" in one of Paula Guran's "Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror" collections. I found it remarkable, and I think the word I ultimately used was "lovely". Oh yes, it was at least that. I waited patiently for further stories from her, and treasured each one that I encountered. Here then is, as far as I know, the first collection of her short works. And it is as remarkable as I anticipated. In fact, I will sum up this blurb kind of abruptly, because "All The Fabulous Beasts" is, in fact, likely to be the best book I will read all year. It's all that good. Every story. Every. Single. Story. If you have a heart, and if you are a devoted reader, you must, then you cannot help but be overwhelmed by what you find between these covers. I am in awe. Also I am somewhat befuddled, wondering how 2020 can possibly be more wonderful than the experience of reading this work has made it. Of course, another Priya Sharma title might eclipse this one. There's always that possibility. What a lovely thought!

• The two features most common in the characters of Priya Sharma’s excellent fantasy short story collection are (1) being, as one puts it, “encumbered by the dead,” either literally seeing ghosts or being haunted by past deaths for which they feel guilt, and (2) being really close to Nature, especially the animal world, to the extent of transforming into animals in a number of cases. Family relationships, especially between mothers and children, also feature in several stories. My favorite stories were “Pearls,” in which a modern version of Medusa (who got a really raw deal in the original myth) gets her own back, and “The Nature of Bees”: it was obvious where the latter tale was going, but I really enjoyed the writing involved in getting it there. There’s an edge (or more than an edge) of horror to a few stories, such as “The Show,” which deals with the not-unfamiliar idea of a fake “ghost hunter” show encountering the Real Thing, but an air of sadness and regret is more common. Hope also occurs often, with parental love vanquishing danger, as in “Egg” and “The Sunflower Seed Man.” I strongly recommend these quiet, beautifully written stories to anyone who enjoys gentle and thoughtful fantasy.

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