31 Days of Halloween { review } The Phantom Queen Awakes, edited by Mark S. Deniz
The Phantom Queen Awakes, edited by Mark S. Deniz. © 2010 Morrigan Books. ISBN 9789197760591. Paperback. Dark Fantasy. 296 pages. $20.00 US. Source: egalley via publishers
Synopsis: The Phantom Queen, goddess of death, love and war, returns to strike fear into the hearts of mortals in the anthology, The Phantom Queen Awakes. Meet a washerwoman on the shores of the river; cleaning the clothes of the soon-to-be-dead; try to bargain with the capricious goddess of war; hear the songs of the dead as they cry for justice; walk with heroes of the past Revisit the world of the Celts; a land of mystical beauty, avarice, lust and war through stories told by Katharine Kerr, C.E. Murphy, Elaine Cunningham and Anya Bast, among many other talented authors.
Review: Considering that An Morrigan is my patron goddess, I was very eager to read this anthology. An Morrigan is not an easy goddess to understand and I was very worried about what this anthology would contain (I realize that this is fiction, but still I worried).
The forward was very interesting in that it captured exactly what and who An Morrigan is. She is not a goddess that can be fit into any box or one function and yet most of her roles are tied into the aspect of war. I’m glad that the editor knew that and kept that in mind while choosing stories for this anthology.
All in all there are seventeen short stories in this anthology. What is great about them is that they are a mix from both male and female authors, and this helped give a wide perspective of who An Morrigan is. With the exception of one story, I really enjoyed all of the stories in this anthology.
There were love stories (though not in the conventional sense), as well as stories of gore and blood, and the the pact with the gods kind of stories. My favorites of course were the ones that were expansions on myth stories that I knew, stories like Kiss of the Morrigan, The Children of Badb Catha, The Plain of Pillars, and The Silver Branch.
I’m giving this anthology an overall score of 4.35/5 (my score came from scoring each individual story and then averaging them all).
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“I originally stumbled across a call for submissions for this anthology in a community on LiveJournal that centered around the Morrigan. I’m familiar with the Morrigan from a life-long love of the different mythologies of the world. Additionally, roughly three-quarters of my ancestry is rooted in Ireland and Scotland, the ancient home of the Morrigan. I’ve known since I was fairly young (14 or 15, perhaps) that the Catholic faith I was brought up in wasn’t a good fit for me. It wasn’t that I didn’t necessarily believe in those things; it was more that they didn’t sing to me. I could believe in them the same way that I could believe that the earth revolved around the sun, but they didn’t inspire me with the deep faith that so many saints and mystics have written of. 
