I think the best way I can describe a book like this, as well as the best reason I can recommend it, is this. By and large, that’s an enjoyable outcome to have from a good short story. There was a gravity with each one that begged for me to take a moment to digest what it was I had just read. Overall I enjoyed this collection, however it wasn’t one that I could sit down and rip through story after story in one sitting. The editors didn't stick too closely to the theme or tradition, but I mostly enjoyed the read. Overall, it's a rather uneven anthology, but has some definite standouts. It's very moody and very English and quite worthwhile. Gargoyles on Mars, you betcha! Lucy Taylor has an unpleasant story about obsession and children, and then the last new story in the book is by Brian Hodge, who provides a good story about a haunted church. Next up is the only science fiction story in the book, a fun romp by Marc Levinthal and John Mason Skipp called Now Entering Monkeyface. It's followed by a very good one, a Southern Gothic, Poe-influenced, spooky, creepy, nifty story by Wendy Webb, with whom I was previously unfamiliar. It's followed by a long, confused, and confusing story by Jo Clayton I kept looking at it, but it didn't go anywhere. Kiernan, a very chilling short shocker that's quite powerful. The best story in the book may be Found Angels by Christa Faust and Caitlin R.
Harris a typical late-20th-century psychological horror by Melanie Tem a story by Nancy Holder that's like the Tem but even more dark and confused and Alan Rodgers contributes an okay story about the dangers of being alone in a crowd. Grant cerebral horror story a short and well-written modern urban horror from Neil Gaiman that he probably wouldn't his children to stumble upon casually a very amusing, cute, and Irish story by Katherine Kurtz another well-written story about a lonely child that's perhaps the closest to the book's theme by Don D'Ammassa another amusing Irish fantasy by Jane Yolen and Robert J.
The three reprints are by Charles de Lint (a very short story about a lonely child from the Borderlands series), Brian Lumley (an excerpt from a longer story that didn't make much sense on its own I've no idea why they included it), and Harlan Ellison (his 1972 story Bleeding Stones, a good one which would have been called bizarre-extreme-splatterpunk-flash or somesuch if there had been such a need for labels back then.) The new stories include a very good, traditional Charles L. Three of the stories are reprints and the rest appear here for the first time. This is an anthology of seventeen stories pertaining to gargoyles.
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