Defy the Dark ed. by Saundra Mitchell (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Defy the Dark ed. by Saundra Mitchell
Seventeen YA authors contribute to this collection of short stories structured around a single moment: a kiss in the dark from a stranger. There's therefore a fair amount of romance here, but it's the dark element that really holds the whole thing together with a slightly sinister thread running through every story, whether it be a realistic piece about a girl contemplating suicide ("The Moth and the Spider") or a bizarre fantasy featuring a boy with the ability to dreamwalk ("There's Nowhere Else"). The two most powerful pieces bookend the collection: Courtney Summers' opening exploration of an obsessive love that leads to a watery death is a rather ironic counterpart to Tess Gratton's closing story, an optimistic revision of Ophelia's part [End Page 521] in Hamlet that has O's love for Hal leading her to freedom from the social norms of gender and class. A few of the other stories draw on urban legends as their inspiration, and while they are salaciously enjoyable, they are also mostly predictable. Dia Reeves, Beth Revis, and Carrie Ryan build on worlds better established in their full-length novels, but their portrayals of a hellish otherworld, a claustrophobic spaceship, and the beginnings of a zombie invasion offer enough action to spur readers on. Despite the unevenness of the quality here, the collection's range of genres, from science fiction to vampire stories to realism, gives it broad appeal and offers a complement to the dystopian-laden collections popular of late.
