Heroes in Training, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Jim C. Hines

I approached Heroes in Training expecting stories starring child and teen heroes undergoing rites de passage in order to prove their maturity. The term “hero” is much more loosely defined in this book, however. Within its pages, we meet a variety of species, ages, and moral orientations, whose common challenge is a moment in their lives that requires bravery.

I always pay keen attention to the first and last stories of an anthology. The first-position story is like the antho’s way of shaking my hand and saying, “How do you do?” It gives me initial impressions by which I begin to judge the book as a whole. In this regard, editors Martin H. Greenberg and Jim C. Hines chose a winning, accessible author, the always witty Esther M. Friesner, to start off the proceedings with “Roomies.” The story, set at a finishing school for girls learning to be damsels in distress, features the beautiful, studious, and socially outcast [due to being poor] Auriana and her earnest, ostracized [due to being plain] friend, Brandella. Auriana befriends Brandella, standing up for her against other students’ mockery and tutoring her in the ways of passive princesses. The two become mixed up with a pompous, heroic prince and a menacing dragon, and Brandella’s secret identity saves the day. Light in tone and swift in pace [except for some clunky expository dialogue early on], “Roomies” blends intelligence and a wry feminist streak into a story that sets the bar high.

Vera Nazarian follows suit with the elegant and classically styled “Three Names of the Hidden God.” Lowly birdcatcher, Ruogo, helps a dying bird back to life. The results of this good deed are delivered back to him [as usually happens in such tales] when he becomes entangled with the scheming rulers of the city and their excavation of a submerged temple to an unknown deity. Mythic and satisfying in its arc, this rhythmically told story contains gems of character insight, as well as a paean to beauty and kindness. Nazarian writes with care and precision, fitting words together as carefully and tightly as temple bricks, so that the end result is a a marvelous structure of storytelling.

Sherwood Smith offers “The Princess, the Page, and the Master Cook’s Son,” set among the fantastical trappings of wizard, magic, castles, and nobles, but concerned with exploration of realistic emotions. Used to hiding from the fearsome steward and obeying the princess, servant Kimet finds her position changed when she must hide in the castle with Princess Zarja. Outside, the court wizard turns Zarja’s parents into statues, and treachery may be occurring, but the two girls aren’t sure. Smith spends most of the story tightly zeroed in on Zarja and Kimet, who must learn to overcome social protocol in order to trust each other and, in their second challenge, face the scary changes outside. While Smith’s focus on Kimet and Zarja brings them to life as clearly delineated, sympathetic characters, it does prevent the reader from figuring out exactly what might be happening outside. I was never clear if there were clear dangers [say, a future life as lawn ornaments] for the two girls or if they were just misinterpreting. Nevertheless, “The Princess…” is a taut, suspenseful exploration of two teen girls in what is essentially a hostage situation.

Robin Wayne Bailey’s “Children’s Crusade” shares some thematic substance with its predecessor, treating as “The Princess” does, with young children observing conflicts beyond their control. Bailey writes in a similarly compelling style, sketching personalities with a few salient details, but he distinguishes himself from Smith by setting his story in the modern day [from which I think Smith’s story would have benefited]. How much more immediate and topical can you get than Ari, an Iraqi teen who practices resistance bombing against American forces? Guilty over his part in a mission, Ari develops his teleporting abilities, befriending an Israeli boy, Abraham, with the same powers. Ari moves across the globe, finding other young teleporters, and they all descend upon Washington, D.C. with a plan…. The tense pace of this thriller never lets up, especially when we see the immense physical toll that teleportation has on Ari. Finally, after all that effort—well, I was rather underwhelmed by the culmination, which seemed like a largely symbolic gesture that did not have as much punch as Ari’s earlier heroic activities. “Crusade” is a hell of a ride, though, and thought-provoking to boot.

Around this point, one-third of the way through or so, anthologies usually take a turn. If they’re humming along successfully, they often crap out and yield a dud. Conversely, if mediocre, they may yet rise to higher quality. And yet here’s Heroes in Training, still going strong on story five: “The Apprentice” by Catherine H. Shaffer. Briefer and lighter than the ones before, it acts as a piquant palate cleanser. Princess Sari and Prince Ivan, longtime rivals, must collaborate to solve a series of deadly challenges if they are to keep their jobs, their magician status, and, oh yeah, their lives, too. Shaffer’s sprightly story sends up everything from fairy-tale cliches to corporate culture to academia to the battle between the sexes [whether you think it’s a real thing or not]. It’s a sly, erudite, but not overdone, counterbalance to the heavier earlier stuff.

So far we’ve been observing our usual heroes: kindly commoners, idealistic children, smart princes and princesses—people whom it is easy to root for. James Lowder’s “Beneath the Skin,” though, takes a turn for the brutal in the story of Simon Synge, werewolf stalker, who, in order to find a missing child, must become the thing that he hunts. Filled with stormy nights, horrible wounds, dire battles, and bereaved mothers, “Beneath the Skin” runs thick with gore, grit, and dramatic tension. Gothic in scope, it yet partakes of a more modern psychological turn as it comments on the mind of a man who regularly looks into the abyss and feels it change him, not necessarily for the worse, but definitely for the…more disturbing. The unrelenting grimness of this tale obscures the supposed hero-in-training motif [as far as I can tell, Simon is an expert at his job] in favor of a doom-laden departure from the prior YA fare. Lowder’s story deserves pride of place in a horror anthology. Its sophisticated, mortality-obsessed execution distinguishes it from the other stories in Heroes in Training.

In the same parodic spirit as “The Apprentice,” G. Scott Huggins’s “Giantkiller” brings us a new version of Jack and the Beanstalk. In this iteration, Jack discovers that his cow is actually a shape-changed princess and double agent spying against the cloud-dwelling giants. Inserting James-Bond-like memoir clips in between his rather wacky turns of events, Huggins writes a trippy parody, which, if not always completely comprehensible, is all-around inventive and funny.

“Drinker” by Michael Jasper provides a model for enveloping readers in a nonhuman, alien culture [in contrast to “Touch of Blue” below, which falters in this regard]. The main character, an ape-like[?] Drinker who transports water in his belly back to his underground comrades, reflects frequently about his status as a waterbearer and his place in history, both lines of thought providing convenient vehicles for culturecraft and world immersion at the same time. While Jasper does not hesitate to populate the Drinker’s world in rich, foreign, palpable details, he also clearly defines the Drinker’s conflict. I’m not saying that a nonhuman’s conflict needs to be screamingly obvious, but it really helps if, as Jasper does, you make the nonhuman’s problem readily apparent and give him a passionate response to it so that readers, too, may care. In the Drinker’s case, he struggles against the suspicious conservatism of his fellow creatures as he finds a way to preserve his environment and his species. Mournful in tone, but ending with a bit of hope, Jasper’s understated prose provides food for thought about our own adaptation [or lack thereof] to planetary changes.

In “King Harrowhelm,” Ed Greenwood visits Arthurian legends through the innocent eyes of young knight Griflet. He and other Round Table knights challenge the corrupt knight Harrowhelm; wizardry, jousting, and competition for the High Kingship ensue. Much like T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Greenwood depicts the chivalric world with the messy emotions, moral choices, and gore that the stylized legends gloss over. Griflet, who spends much of his time either asking puzzled questions or shrinking from scary things, proves an inactive, even passive, protagonist, differing from the many energetic heroes elsewhere in this book. However, Greenwood’s close attention to how witnessed events affect Griflet suggests an interesting interpretation of how heroes are made. Some may be called to daring feats, while others, like Griflet, may see injustice, brood on it, and then rise to a more active type of heroism beyond the story’s end.

“The Wizard’s Legacy” by Michael A. Burstein contains two middle-class boys under the tutelage of a powerful wizard. Their teacher claims that their skills will be necessary to save the land from a terrible dragon, but what if the worst dragon is within? I really like the concept—especially with the draconic surprises reminiscent of “Roomies”—but the poor writing really fells this story. From its hammy beginning [“Call me Merlin”] through its trite end, the uninflected prose barely engages the reader. The stiff style does not show off the story’s unique twists, instead making it all the more apparent that “Legacy” draws inspiration from the unassuming-kids-reared-to-conquer-a-baneful-menace trope. I kept waiting for some spark of life to animate this story, but it remained moribund for me.

“Honor Is a Game Mortals Play” by Eugie Foster* returns us to a more familiar type of hero: a tough, young woman out to avenge herself on an oni, or spirit, who she believes is responsible for her grandfather’s death and her mother’s absence. It’s slightly more complicated, though, when the oni proves to be incredibly alluring, not to mention insistent that it’s not him who’s at fault. In many of her stories, Foster writes about characters whose stubborn, cruel interpretations of events suddenly change when they begin to feel affection or sympathy for others. It’s a sort of psychological Beauty and the Beast trope that never gets old, at least for me, though I have read many of her iterations on the subject. With prose that often hits grace notes of beauty or poignancy, Foster uses her favorite theme to illustrate the flip sides of fear and desire and the ways in which a character’s own heart can often be the greatest obstacle to face.

“A Touch of Blue: A Web Shifters Story” by Julie E. Czerneda drops you right into the adventures of shape-shifting Esen, whose elder, Ersh, is a sculptor on the verge of an important art show. Bombarding you with foreign elements without respite, “A Touch of Blue,” unlike “The Drinker,” allows little time for the reader to acclimate to this new world. Czerneda ruminates over details, like Esen’s various nicknames, while neglecting to demonstrate why I should be at all invested in the artistic leanings of beings who call each other by a name [“web-kin”] that bears a distracting resemblance to Webkins, the stuffed toys with online games attached. Finally, Czerneda spends much of the story building up Esen’s frustration with Ersh but then omits Esen’s heroic action entirely, leaving a lacuna of plot that I’m still not quite sure how to fill in. Czerneda has a lively, entertaining style with glints of humor, but they are hard to find in this frustrating mishmash.

And we close out the anthology with Peter David’s “Sir Apropos of Nothing and the Adventure of the Receding Heir.” Anyone expecting a punny high note will be sorely mistaken. This is biting gallows humor narrated by the sardonic Apropos. Like King Haggard in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, he is a crabbed, shunned old man who decides to find an heir by casually stealing a child. The kid grows up to be a worthy successor, then a threat to Apropos’s own head. The two engage in a contest of wits: a battle to the death. While the subject—vicissitudes of a rather repugnant man—is analogous to that of “Beneath the Skin,” “Sir Apropos” fits in well with the rest of the anthology where “Beneath the Skin” doesn’t. While “Beneath the Skin” has a strikingly nihilistic vein that makes it horrific, “Sir Apropos” takes a humorous tack. Apropos may be a cruel man, but he’s mordant as well, and, filtered through his snarky consciousness, the events seem more humorous and palatable. Plus “Sir Apropos” actually does contain a hero in training, even if Apropos does eventually want to kill the kid. Twisted enough to be unusual but not thematically out of bounds, “Sir Apropos” concludes the anthology by undermining the concept of heroism and forces you to think about the whole shebang. In a nutshell, Heroes in Training ultimately triumphs over the challenges of a rather nebulous organizing principle and hits high points with almost every single story.

Publisher: DAW Books (Sept. 2007)
Price: $7.99
Paperback: 320 pages
ISBN: 075640438X

[*Disclosure notice: Eugie Foster is the managing editor of The Fix.]