Overall Rating: 2/5
This is generally unimpressive collection that suffers from the uneven nature that anthologies tend to suffer from, though it has fewer redeeming stories in it than most others I've read. There were some pretty terrible stories here, some decent ones, but only a couple that were truly worth reading.

My main issue with the collection as a whole is that the stories I didn't like generally had a lot of the same problems. They seemed to meander into pointlessness, as if they were written solely to fit the theme of the collection (whether or not that's true) or to show off an exotic setting, instead of entertaining and delighting. Too much emphasis was placed on description, and not enough on character, plot, and thought-provoking messages. Many of the stories ended with cheap twists that had me rolling my eyes or blankly turning to the next story, instead of leaving me with a feeling of poignancy or contemplation.
Such a waste, considering the depth of the well that the theme of this collection offered.

Diana of the Hundred Breasts, by Robert Silverberg (1/5)
A typical, “hardcore skeptic sees something that he can't explain,” type story. Some archaeologist finds a tomb, opens it, and the aforementioned god with many breasts starts roaming the country-side before disappearing into the sky. Maybe it's a god, maybe it's an alien, maybe it was a hallucination brought about by latent chemicals in the tomb. Who knows? A better question is; who cares? Not me, that's for sure.

The Face of Sekt, by Storm Constantine (2/5)
An alright story about a living deity who questions her deity status before breaking free of her earthly prison and claiming her true power. Best thing about it was the fantastic descriptions of setting, which made the story have that immersion factor.

The Goddess Danced, by Lois Tilton (4/5)
This is the first story in the collection that struck a chord with me. It’s about a young woman named Meena living in the Middle East and treated, as one might expect, terribly by her father, the blind husband she’s forced to marry (since no man that can see would ever marry, or should I say ‘buy’, a disfigured woman. More on her disfigurement in a second), and pretty much every other man in the story, as well as her mother-in-law. She’s beaten, raped, and a young man melts half her face off with acid for denying his sexual advances (melting most of the skin off her skull). This happens in a society where she was TAUGHT to be virtuous, modest, and abstinent since childhood. Seriously? You either want your women to have sex or you don't. I mean, you shouldn't be controlling them regardless, but if you're going to control them at least have some cultural consistency. It's like teaching my cat that he's not allowed in my lap and then beating him because he won't get in my lap.

Somehow she puts up with all of this abuse and even grows detached to it. That is, until she overhears her step-mother and husband talking about killing her off so that he can marry her fourteen year-old sister instead (which of course her father would be fine with as his wife died giving birth to her and so she’s been dead to him from the moment she was born. Real fantastic human beings in this story, huh?). After overhearing this, she comes into the house screaming that she won’t let them take her little sister and they LIGHT. HER. ON. FIRE. Right there on the spot. Apparently immolation is a common way to get rid of wives you no longer want around, as it’s faster and easier than divorce and can be swept away as a “cooking accident.” Luckily this is a mythology/magic-themed collection and she gets some supernatural retribution at the very end that ties nicely into the subtle foreshadowing that was done throughout the story.

I don't think any short story has ever made me so angry, which is a good thing. Any time a story can make me feel an emotion strongly, even if it’s an unpleasant one, I’d say it’s doing a good job.

The Grotto, by Kathryn Ptacek (1/5)
An overly depressing and boring story about a woman who's going to die of cancer soon. She decides to spend her final days visiting her grandparent's homeland—a small, relatively unremarkable city in Tuscany somewhere. At the end, instead of dying, she...becomes the Etruscan god of death, I guess. Meh.

The Eleventh City, by Gene Wolfe (2/5)
This entire story is basically some writer talking to his editor about something he witnessed while living in Central America and writing about local folklore, and asking whether or not this thing he witnessed counts as folklore since it was a fellow American that told the tale. Much like The Face of Sekt the saving grace was how good the description was, which isn't surprising. Grounding you in a place and tickling your senses are Gene Wolfe's specialties. Unfortunately he still needs to work on making the other aspects of a story interesting.

Heart of Stone, by Lawrence Watt-Evans (5/5)
I'm a sucker for short stories that read like fairy tales that were written a long time ago. This is a fantastic example of that approach to short story writing.

A wizard is chased out of his house by fearful villagers, who leave the place ransacked and empty. Unfortunately the wizard left a young woman of his own creation behind, trapped inside the stone walls like a shadow. She laments in the loneliness of her stone prison for a while before a disreputable man stumbles into the place and discovers her. He takes advantage of her desire for company and conversation and uses her to make money off of folks by telling their fortunes.

Eventually she has enough of his mistreatment, both of her and of gullible villagers, and chases him off, deciding that dealing with the loneliness would be better than dealing with him. Sadly, the villagers, having seen her during the fortune telling sessions, decide to knock the house down to the foundation to make sure she's dead since she's an unholy abomination and all that. She has no idea what's going to happen when they bust down the walls, but she assumes that she'll die. Instead, she becomes a real flesh and blood person for the first time, finally freed from her stone prison and able to go anywhere and experience life and all of its' hardships and wonders. This story is a poster child for the phrase, “a simple tale, told well.” Beautiful stuff.

Cora, by Esther Friesner (2/5)
I'm not even sure how to describe this story. Basically it's about a Manticore, its' owner, the sexual assault he experienced at the hands of his rich aunt, and a young man he falls in love with. Unfortunately their relationship is volatile and, ultimately, fated to end. It's alright for what it is, but written strangely. It's omniscient, and conversations are summed up in that, “Say what now? You don't like this?” sort of way, only showing one person' side of the conversation. I've never been a fan of that. It always comes across as stilted and awkward, and it compresses time in a way that takes you out of the moment entirely.

Ascension, by Yvonne Navarro (3/5)
Like Eleventh City, this is another Mexican/Spanish-themed story that fails to truly grab me. Such a shame, as I really like the idea of that setting and culture and would love to read a story that does it justice. Basically some priest has an affair with a woman he doesn't intend to marry and when she protests he strangles her to death and hides her body in a secret place on the roof of the church. Two centuries pass and she sits there like a statue, dead but still somehow conscious and looking down on the streets of the village. The virgin Mary eventually lets her loose on a descendant of the man who killed her just as he's about to start having an affair with a peasant woman that, I guess, is doomed to end the same way. She kills him and places him on the roof where she used to be, and then goes and turns into a statue outside the church and is worshiped as a miracle.

It's one of the shorter stories in the collection and doesn't do a great job of making you feel the passage of time that this woman endured. In some ways it's powerfully written. I particularly like this passage:

The descendants of He Who Put Me Here visit the cathedral every Sunday, then again on the holiest of days. Perhaps these regal Spaniards believe this will elevate them to grace, but to my knowing eyes the passage of centuries has not dulled the blood on their hands.

Unfortunately that's just not enough to make up for the fact that it feels too short and like it doesn't have any meat on the bone. Also, it is basically a typical 'jilted lover' story and the setting and supernatural elements don't really go far enough to give it a unique identity.

Mud, by Brian McNaughton (1/5)
This story starts with an intriguing idea—that mud is somehow sentient and malevolent and that the horrors of world war I or II (wasn't clear to me one way or the other), which the viewpoint character is fighting in at the time of the story, somehow released it—but it's immediately tossed aside for an action scene with guns and grenades that goes on for far too long and does nothing to establish character or plot. One of my pet peeves is needless action scenes, and I can't think of a more needless action scene than one that happens at the very begging of a story, before I have to chance to attach myself to any of the characters. Here's an excerpt from the end of that action scene to give you an idea of the tone of this story.

“I am Sergeant Miller, great-grandson of Miller the gallows bird, and I must advise you that you should have surrendered before using the last of your ammunition to kill my men.”
I then blew his head off.

Seriously? Did I pick up a cheesy military action anthology by mistake? What the heck is going on here? It goes back to the mud thing eventually, which turns out to be related to some god from the Cthulhu mythos that I'm unfamiliar with (I know, I know. I'm a bad Lovecraft fan. I'm working my way through his bibliography. Slowly. I'll get there though). Unfortunately the payoff was nowhere near good enough to be worth the unnecessary, cheesy action I had to wade through at the start, nor the less than stellar writing throughout. I have to give the story credit for one thing though—it taught me a fantastic new word I'd never encountered before—pudendum.

Shaped Stones, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman (2/5)
This is a story about three orphaned children during the great depression. The oldest of them, Teru, has some latent magical talent, being able to hide himself and his siblings when necessary by disguising them as rats or shadows, until one day a man sees through his illusions and offers to take care of him and his siblings if he becomes his apprentice. Teru accepts and is led to the man's super rich mansion-tower, full of weird stuff and things, where he begins to learn sorcery.

The man is true to his word . . . until the very last moment, which anybody with half a brain would see coming from the very first scene he's in. He performs a ritual that locks the two younger children in a glass heart (so that they'll be safe forever, as he promised) and forces Teru to give up his innocent heart in exchange for an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Teru turns into a cold intellectual until he figures out that coming into contact with creatures made out of stone (an angel in a cemetery and a black sphinx in a hidden room of the mansion-tower being the only examples) somehow bring his heart and all his feelings flooding back to him, and that's how the story ends.

I enjoyed the story alright up until the end, which made me kind of not like the story as a whole. It offered a mystery that I felt wasn't earned. The weird god Teru's master summoned looked like a stone face, so there's a stone god who has Teru's heart and thus stone creatures make him feel things again? And the strange man seemed to have no deeper motivation than he wanted an apprentice and he was a bit of a dick, which was a letdown. Even though it was obvious from the start that he was going to turn out to be evil, I was still expecting his motives to be cool or interesting in some way, but they were just boring. Such a shame, as the beginning of the story really gets your hopes up.

Wanderlust, by M. Christian (2/5)
A traveling salesman picks up a hula hoop girl to go on his dashboard and draws the attention of some 'goddess of the road' that took notice of his endless traveling and sort of possesses the doll. He only stops when he absolutely needs gas and food. When he does everybody sees in him the most beautiful thing they can imagine and pretty much give him stuff for free. A benefit of the hula hoop god. Unfortunately for him, after not very much time they start to see the most horrific thing they can imagine when they look at him, as the hula hoop doll calls him back to the car, where he can never leave.

Giotto's Window, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (3/5)
A pretty decent, “dude is insane, but really he's the only sane one,” type story that evokes Lovecraft without being a direct nod to him. An American living in Italy has a break from reality where he sees everyone, including himself, as monsters with beaks and tentacles and such. His parents hire a psychiatrist to fly in and bring him home, and she winds up seeing what he sees, but tries to ignore it. Probably the most interesting aspect of the story is that the man never says that people are secretly evil or conspiring to do evil. He just maintains that everyone looks like monsters but refuse to see it, but they all seem to act the same as regular people, so is there really a difference?

Masks, by Jack Ketchum and Edward Lee (1/5)
A mythological gang bang story (literally) that goes on for way too long and would be more at home in an erotica collection, complete with a stupid and unearned twist at the end.

At Eventide, by Kathe Koja (3/5)
A story about two people—a predator and his former victim. He finds her in a magazine, as she's become semi-famous by making memory boxes for people. He goes to her isolated workshop with some of her hair, which he had from their encounter years ago, and demands she make a box for him because he's dying. She tells him she can't. That all he has is what he's taken from others and nothing of his own. He doesn't have the energy to do anything about it and leaves, dying later that night in the cold of the desert.

That Glisters Is, by Tanith Lee (3/5)
The life story of a gay man and his lover. The supernatural element is basically the idea that the afterlife is within us, and that certain people share the same “inner world,” and will end up in the same place. ( )