Changes

There's varying levels of success, as you'd expect from a wide variety of 13 authors, but the best stories here are quite simply stunning. My personal favourite - apart possibly from one I'll come to later - is The Spy Who Never Grew Up from Sarah Brennan. As the title suggests, it features Peter Pan as a spy, working for the British Secret Service in exchange for a particular reward. It's simultaneously hilarious, romantic, and not a little tragic, in the best possible way. Other really impressive offerings include Michelle Rowan's Fearless - in which a trainee witch chooses a scrawny looking cat as a familiar, only to find out once they're magically bound together that he's a shapechanger who was hiding in a magic shop - and Maggie Stiefvater's breathtaking The Hounds of Ulster, which is a beautifully written story of two Irish musicians growing apart thanks to the influence They have on Bryant the narrator's friend Sullivan. Funnily enough, it's probably best described as the written equivalent of one of the punk songs that Bryant and Sullivan play - hugely entertaining, brilliantly constructed, and with the only drawback being that it's too short.

Diana Peterfreund's Errant is a stunning example of how to do this - it lasts just over 30 pages but packs in as much character development as some novels do, and is the perfect introduction to Peterfreund's world of unicorn hunters. This is the story I mentioned earlier as rivalling The Spy Who Never Grew Up for my favourite in the collection, by the way. Similarly, Rachel Vincent's Fearless is a prequel to her Soul Screamers universe. ''Mara'' Sabine, who feeds on people's nightmares, is sent to a juvenile detention centre - but has to try and work out why no-one there is having bad dreams. She's an author who was completely unfamiliar to me prior to this anthology but, like Peterfreund, is one I'll be eagerly seeking out in the future.