Beauty Has Her Way
Edited by Jennifer Brozek

Dark Quest Books, 2011

$14.95 (tpb)

When given the opportunity to read and review Beauty Has Her Way, an anthology edited by Jennifer Brozek, I jumped on the chance. I positively loved the last anthology of hers that I had read, Close Encounters of the Urban Kind, and looked forward to diving into this collection.

In the introduction, Jennifer Brozek cites the song “Beauty Has Her Way” by Mummy Calls as an inspiration for the anthology. Her interpretation of the song evolved until she came up with doing an anthology based around the notion of women using all of their assets to get their way. This is not to be confused with the idea of them using those assets to do the right thing.

There are many good stories in this collection, including some heavy hitters who really knock the stories out of the park. I’ll highlight each of them farther down, but suffice to say that the book is generally good. But I did have a few challenges.

The first is that my favorite stories were towards the end. The beginning of the book dragged a lot for me as the stories just didn’t jump out at me. By the end, I was pulled more deeply into things, but the earlier frustration didn’t fade easily.

The second is a bit of bias on my part. When reading a themed collection like this, I want the theme to be an integral part of the stories. I don’t want to feel like you could easily re-skin the story to fit some other theme. So in a book of stories about women, I want their gender to tie into the plot rather than feeling like it’s a story where the protagonist just happens to be a woman. Many of the stories meet my ideal, but there were also some that didn’t. Some of them were great stories regardless, but didn’t satisfy what I was looking for in this anthology.

The third is more of a surreal bafflement than annoyance. About two-thirds of the authors in this anthology identify as male. The first story by a woman came half way through the book, the other four came in towards the end. This isn’t to say there weren’t excellent stories by men in the book, but it was contrary to what I’d expect in anthology like this.
The anthology is divided into three parts: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. “Yesterday” is for fantasy and historical fantasy stories. “Today” contains urban fantasy and contemporary stories. “Tomorrow” contains sci-fi and apocalyptic fantasy.

“Yesterday” opens with “Sacrifices to the Moon” by Paul D. Batteiger. The story is a sword-and-sorcery yarn, very much in the vein of Robert E. Howard, with the plot very evocative of Beowulf. In the place of the usual muck and muscle thug is a savage woman, Sheol of the Jann, who steps in to save the day. As an homage to Howard, I thought it worked well. Taken on its own merits, I didn’t enjoy it as much. Sheol fell flat for me and the prose felt awkward at times. More interesting, and more fitting with what I wanted from the anthology, was the big antagonist of the story: the Dark Mother. Her story had exactly what I wanted, but it didn’t come out until the end, after I had become frustrated.

After this came “Dunkle Froline” by Ramsey Lundock. The title, if I’m reading it right, is a variation on the German “Dunkel Fräulein.” It’s two of a handful of German words I saw modified in the text. I’m not certain why the author chose to go this route, but as someone who once studied German, the German variations nagged at me every time. The story revolved around Tessa, a human pit slave who has been bought as a house slave by a member of the ruling race, the infernal dunkle volk. Though taken from a subterranean and cannibalistic anarchy, Tessa despises working in the posh manor of the dunkle volk referred to only as “the Master.” After repeated punishments for her stubbornness and her attempt at murder, she decides on a new tactic for dealing with her enslavement.

I didn’t care about Tessa or any of the other humans presented in the story. They were neither sympathetic nor interesting. The Master I might have read more about. The dialogue felt awkward. The setting read like it was lifted from a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, to the point where the dunkle volk exhibited resistance to normal weapons like a creature from the Monster Manual. It did succeed in tying gender into the plot, but that just didn’t save the story for me.

After “Dunkle Froline,” it was hard for me to continue through the anthology. Thankfully things picked up sharply from that point, starting with Joshua Palmatier’s “Tears of Blood.” The story came from the point of view of Ayisha, a woman on the edge of inheriting the rulership of a city and the throne that stores the memories of all the previous women who have ruled it. Ayisha proves to be more of an observer in events as Katherine, the current Mistress of Amenkor, must find a way to deal with a plague. It’s a story about the weight of rulership and the hard decisions needed to preserve the needs of the city over the individual people in it. The gender of the protagonists seemed irrelevant, but the story was good enough that it was forgivable.

“I, Theodora” by Maurice Broaddus took place in the Roman Empire during the reign of Caligula. Broaddus’s prose was excellent, and he seamlessly wove in details of ancient Rome into the narrative to lend the necessary touches to bring it to life. The story started as a fascinating tale of those who embody gods. Once a year Theodora, a prostitute, took on the role of “earthly vessel for the goddess Flora.” A visitation from Caligula, who believes himself a god, seemed ripe for potential. But Theodora did not seem to really do much in the story and there was very little plot. What started out as excitement for me at the beginning dissipated into confusion and frustration by the end.

My favorite story for this section also turned out to be the last: “Vengeance is Mine” by Kenneth Mark Hoover. Set in the Old West, it told the story of Magra Snowberry, and her work to protect the man she loves. Magra is the child of a Swedish father and Native American mother, trained by her mother in magical arts. The story weaves through both the real world and surreal places of the otherworldly as Magra bends all of her cunning and power into protecting the man she loves.

“Today” kicks off with Chuck Wendig’s “The Moko-Jubmie Girl,” a fun tale of African gods coming to Colorado by way of Trinidad. Kalinda is asked by her mother to get Kalinda’s brother, Prince, out of trouble. This leads to Kalinda sitting in the back of a police care covered in blood and chicken feathers, where the story begins. The tale only lightly touched on gender, but there was some very interesting commentary on racial perceptions that came through the story.

Following this came “Someone Else to Play With” by Pete Kempshall. This story is told from the point of view of Mickey, a lower class man in London who finds himself in an unusual relationship with an upper class woman. It plays on the notion of the “woman who wants to change you,” and has some surprising twists that proved delightful. This was very much my favorite from this section.

“Daggers in Her Garters” by the legendary Ed Greenwood turned out to be a straightforward story. Daera Griffon has concocted an elaborate plan to stop the wealthy Gordon Ravenstone from moving forward with real estate plans. She also intends to get a little vengeance in the process to boot. The story was fine and hit all the high notes for the anthology, but the story itself didn’t jump out at me.

The first story by a woman, “Men Do Nothing” by Filamena Hill, was another vengeance story but one with a bit more bite. Sophia is the daughter of a mob boss and her mismatched eyes feed rumors of her being a strega, or witch. When her cousin and best friend, Angie, is killed by her husband, Sophia’s father refuses to act in order to maintain peace among the families. Where men won’t act, Sophia is forced to take matters into her own hands. The story is tightly wound around the disparity in gender roles in the family, and even has a hint of messages from the other side of death slipped in. The only complaint I could offer is that Hill leaves a hook out there for more story that never comes. The story feels like the opening of a novel, rather than a self-contained story.

“Becoming” by David A. Hill Jr. tells of Detective Stephanie Sullivan, who leaves the force in order to pursue the drug dealer that she blames for her husband’s death. She works her way up through the dealer’s lieutenants until she comes face to face with the dealer himself. Most of the story revolves around her taking out the lieutenants, which proved to be a shortcoming or me. Because there was little to no background on any of the characters, neither Sullivan’s suffering nor the revenge on the lieutenants meant anything to me. This could be excellent as a novel, but as a short story it suffered from lack of development.

“Witch Fire” by Erik Scott de Bie was a fun, action-filled romp. It is set in a world where magic has returned and redefined the face of the world. After a leisurely start, it literally explodes into action for the rest of the narrative. While I loved the world and the concepts it introduced, especially gun witches, there were some challenges. As the story unfolded, I increasingly felt like I was reading a chapter pulled from the middle of a book. There was a lot of background to the character that the plot hinged on and the story was left dangling at the end. I’d definitely read the book, though. The other challenge was that of others: The genders of the characters were largely irrelevant. The protagonist, unnamed until the end, could have been a man with almost no impact to the plot.

“Tomorrow” opened up with “Ride the Rebel Wind” by Amanda Gannon, which hit me like a ton of bricks with the beauty of its prose. After my mixed feelings about the earlier stories, the writing for this was a breath of fresh air and was by far the best I had read up until this point. Set in a post-Civil War steampunk setting, the story drew on the idea of a tragic obsession with an enemy, very reminiscent of Moby Dick. As with some other stories, the gender of the protagonists could have been changed without impact to the story. But the story was so fun to read that it almost didn’t matter. I could easily see this story fit into the “Yesterday” section. Had the anthology opened with this, I would have been far more excited starting out.

Keffy R.M. Kehrli one-upped the previous story with “A Well-Embroidered Heart.” The story wove gender identity together with necromancy and Machiavellian scheming in a heartbreaking narrative. Kehrli’s handling of a transgendered protagonist proved so poignant that I just wanted to cry. And maybe hug the protagonist, Lauraina. Born in a male body that did not feel right to her, she was the child of the tyrannical family that ruled the land. Lauraina used her skill at necromancy to resculpt her own flesh and then turn that same talent against her family as she seeded the area. By far, this was my favorite story in the anthology and exactly what I wanted to find in here.

“The Runner” by K.V. Taylor takes the anthology back into a more fantastic setting, where warring clans fight over scraps of land in a swamp in order to control the valuable MacGuffin: blackwood powder. When Cami loses her beloved brother and her clan loses a the war against a rival clan that wants to control the area, Cami is asked by her family to seduce and then murder the leader of the rival clan. Cami is forced to decide where her loyalties lie and what she is willing to give up. The story is very well written and the city carried with it a dark feeling of one constantly on the edge of ruin, which I really liked.

“Trapped Star” by Ann Wilkes is a heist story told against the backdrop of a far future setting where we have escaped to the stars and life is very much the same. Wilkes does a lot of things right in this story in terms of her prose, but the heist itself fell flat for me. Though it wrapped up neatly, I could see this as the opening for a novel with much more bite.

The last story of the anthology, “Her Eyes On” by Kay T. Holt and Bart R. Leib, provided a solid conclusion to the collection. Leda, trapped in a marriage on a male-dominated colony, has worked for years to build her own starship to take her away from the planet and the man she can’t stand. When her husband betrays her and sells her spaceship off, she breaks all the rules to steal it back and make the escape she’s wanted for years. When she recaptures the ship, she’s faced with the problem of what to do with the people who are inside. It’s a wonderful tale of getting what you want, and then having to deal with the consequences, and proved an excellent finale to this book.

All told, there are amazing pieces to be found in this book. For the review, I had to read it cover to cover, which may have proved a disservice to the book. But there’s enough good in here that a more casual read would allow you to just stop when something didn’t work for you. I’d definitely recommend it for a read, with the encouragement to skip ahead as you see fit.