Wonderland

Alice Unchained

released OUT NOW! 384 pages | Paperback/ebook

Editors Marie O’regan and Paul Kane Publisher Titan Books

With Lewis Carroll’s Alice books as inspiration, and some big-name contributors, you’d expect this collection of short stories to be a cut above the usual anthology. Sadly, it doesn’t live up to expectations, with stories often lacking the inventiveness of the source material.

Most of the stories feature an Alice, and as a rule the farther from England and/or the 19th century they’re set, the better they are, because the writers are freer to be inventive and less likely to use overfamiliar tropes. Angela Slatter’s “Smoke ’Em If You Got ’Em”, with a gunslinging Alice hunting down the child-trafficking white rabbit in the wild west, and Laura Mauro’s “The Night Parade”, where a young Japanese woman takes a trip to a Yokai-infested Wonderland, stand out in this regard. Not all the Alices are young; Genevieve Cogman’s “The White Queen’s Pawn” features an elderly Alice carrying a deadly secret. The other thing the better of the Alice-centred stories have in common is a tightness of plot, and clarity. The least satisfying stories feature a confused Alice, their attempts at evoking a hazy, dreamlike state generally resulting in a sense of befuddlement.

The few stories that discard Alice entirely are usually stronger than the ones featuring her, possibly because the characters haven’t been explored as thoroughly in popular culture, which again grants more freedom to the writers. MR Carey’s apocalyptic nightmare “There Were No Birds Left To Fly” is the best one. If you know your Carroll, you’ll recognise the line, and Carey does a clever job of turning a nonsense poem into a horror gem.

This collection is best left to Alice enthusiasts. Too few of the stories provoke a strong response in themselves, so you need a love of Carroll to draw you through them. Miriam McDonald

Lacks the inventiveness of the source material

Carroll gave John Tenniel options for the Walrus’s pal: he could have drawn a butterfly or baronet, not a carpenter.