I’m going to take the opening paragraphs of the very first story in this collection as an example to develop some ideas.
It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first collection of Yoon Ha Lee’s short fiction. Conservation of Shadows includes sixteen of the author’s best stories, as well as a great introduction by Aliette de Bodard and extensive story notes by the author herself. Her works have been included and honorably mentioned in annual “best of” anthologies, and two of her stories (“Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain” and “Ghostweight”) were finalists for the Sturgeon Award. Since then she’s released about thirty pieces of short fiction into the wild, in markets such as F&SF, Lightspeed Magazine, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and here on Tor.com, among others. Yoon Ha Lee’s first professional sale came in 1999-to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, no less. Towards a Taxonomy of Yoon Ha Lee’s Short Fiction, maybe. More than a review, Conservation of Shadows needs its own monograph.
It’s not that there aren’t any hooks or approaches it’s more that there is such a bewildering number of them that, as a reader or reviewer, you feel somewhat like you’ve wandered onto a hitherto undiscovered island full of skittery, unfamiliar species that keep turning out to be something else than what you initially expected. The stories themselves are rarely scary in the traditional sense, but their individual complexity and astonishing level of variety make this an impossible book to encompass in just a few paragraphs. Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee is a terrifying collection of short stories to review.
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