Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales; An Anthology

Datlow's latest collection could be the one to engage teens in the short story format. Fans of Edgar Allan Poe's work or Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (based on Daphne du Maurier's classic short story) will find these more contemporary tales equally compelling. With their uncanny ability to mimic human speech and their reputation as portents and swallowers of human souls, the cold-blooded avian descendants of dinosaurs figure in some bone-chilling fashion in each story. These entries are more psychologically unsettling than scary, and many will prompt teens to recognize their own primal tendencies. The volume as a whole is a creative writing teacher's dream, with its varied approaches to the format. While Joyce Carol Oates's beautifully written "Great Blue Heron" is more traditional, Nicholas Royle's "The Obscure Bird" is so spare that what is left out is more thought provoking than what's included, and Pat Cadigan's amusing "A Little Bird Told Me" waits until the last line to pack its psychological punch. Seanan McGuire's "The Mathematical Inevitability of Corvids," however, which focuses on a teenage girl with Asperger's syndrome who is goaded into violence, may not sit well with some readers.