THE PRIVILEGE OF THE HAPPY ENDING

Johnson plumbs great depths in her third short story collection, full of bittersweet tales of the fantastic.

This pleasingly varied anthology of fantasy and homage collects 14 works, many of which were previously published elsewhere, including the Nebula and Hugo Award finalist and World Fantasy Award–winning “The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe.” Johnson plays expansively with form, style, and subject matter, moving seamlessly from the dreamy second-person “Butterflies of Eastern Texas,” about a ticket-taker aboard an ever-shifting, never-ceasing train, to a charming and pitch-perfect addition to The Wind in the Willows canon, “The Ghastly Spectre of Toad Hall,” and the strange and informative “The Apartment Dweller’s Bestiary,” which uses a series of vignettes to catalogue over 20 fantastical pets and pests that renters may come across. Throughout, she addresses the reader directly about perception, mortality, and storytelling. (After the protagonist of “The Privilege of the Happy Ending” tells someone that her chicken can talk: “Did you think that Ada had lied to the boy to save Blanche? She is a very honest girl. Because no chicken has spoken within your hearing, do you assume none ever has?”) While the entries are uniformly excellent in pacing and prose, the standouts may be the collection’s opener and closer. “Tool-Using Mimics” spins out a half-dozen explanations for a vintage photo of a young girl with tentacles that lead to piercing questions about how much we can know about the past, other species, and each other. The titular novella, which also won a World Fantasy Award, is a compelling fairy tale about a little orphan girl and her talking hen that poignantly interrogates the ways we determine which stories take center stage.

A strange and glimmering jewel for any genre fiction collection.