Prom Nights from Hell, and: 21 Proms (review)

"High school proms are all alike; every unhappy couple is unhappy in its own way," says Rachel Cohn, smartly adapting Tolstoy's famous first line for her contribution to Levithan's panoply of original short stories about that infamous night of highest teen drama. Throughout these two volumes, seemingly every possible constellation of prom pleasure and mayhem, natural and supernatural, is explored. Levithan and Ehrenhaft assemble a star gallery of twenty-one YA authors, and these writers strut their stuff, ably working the short-story form to capture the nuances of the satin and tulle money pit that is the American Prom. In settings ranging from 1980s prep-school banquets to rubber-chicken hotel affairs to tackily be-streamered school cafeterias to a magical 1955 Gullah night in an old barn, their characters find what they're looking for on dance floors, in limos, in rented Winnebagos, at after parties, or not at all; each story creates its own world and the appropriate mood to go with it. Cabot's crew is no less glittery, but for the most part, their occult-themed stories, with the exception of Stephenie Meyer's, are disappointing. Lauren Myracle's piece is, by her own admission, a reworking of "The Monkey's Paw," but as she offers no innovation other than making the characters promcentric, the suspense that creates the original horror is lost. Meyer's well-wrought story of romance between a determinedly wicked demon and an irresistible angel has considerable appeal, but the other efforts fail at the level of form: the long short stories allude to, but don't explain, offstage details that are important for understanding the contexts and characters, making these stories seem like tantalizing excerpts from longer works, with frustrating rather than evocative gaps. Readers who are looking for a tastier supernatural prom bite, or a more satisfying chomp at a prom that bites, will find it in Clement-Moore's Prom Dates from Hell (reviewed below); those finding sufficient complexity in reality will relish Levithan's rewarding collection.