Obverse Books' first The City of the Saved anthology was many things, but first and foremost it was wildly creative, diverse, and unique. While not everything landed, I was so starstruck by the sheer scope that it was hard not for me to be impressed by the series' initial outing. That feeling led me to end my review by expressing something I all but took for granted: "after all, it's the City of the Saved. When is it not exciting?"
Much as I hate to say it, one book later I think we've found our answer. More Tales of the City was at a disadvantage from the start, pressured to keep up the momentum of the burst of color that is Tales of the City. Having looked at the first anthology's boldness in story content, the solution More Tales provides is to worry less about that and start focusing on making the story's styles just as bold – the end result holds up alright, if giving the impression that it's missing the point somewhat.
The individual stories work reasonably well, and in some cases the boldness in styles gives them an entertaining flavor; take, for example, "The Mystery of the Rose," which is written entirely in iambic pentameter, being told by a Shakespeare character and all. This one was my favorite in the set, a lovely look into the identity crises Remakes (reconstructions of fictional characters) might deal with, especially when they've been adapted from real people who were resurrected into the City. Here, the format reads smoothly and allows for lots of room to play with dialogue, writing style, and so on – at various points both leaning into and deliberately rebuking the poetic Shakespearean style. "The Long-Distance Somnambulist" is a runner-up for favorite, with a casual narration style, a charming main character, and plenty of details that play with the anthology's rich sandbox of a setting.
Other stories don't quite coalesce, most notably "Double Trouble at the Parasites on the Proletariat Club"; this one's plot has some entertaining zany energy, but the rambly style peppered with fictional slang had me glazing over til the silliness and interest in the happenings on the page stopped getting through to me. Kelly Hale continues to do her very specific Kelly Hale thing with "The Isis Method"; not that I judge her for it really, but I maintain that her incredibly specific story-writing style is designed for a target audience of one, i.e. herself. There's also "Briar Among Briars" from Jay Eales, which serves as a direct follow-up to his previous story from A Romance in Twelve Parts. It feels relatively out-of-place, having been inserted like this into a different book series, but the premise and format is unique enough to carry it. My main wish is that this story's particular flavor of stylistic boldness hadn't involved transcribing dialectal speech so thickly that it became hard to parse (a trait carried over from the original story).
Hopefully it's coming together now that sure, the individual stories might have slight peaks and valleys, but there's nothing to this book I can point to as being outright bad. It's all agreeable, which pretty much holds true for the product as a whole. On the plus side, everything flows nicely, each story positing questions of stories vs. reality and identity in the afterlife and then exploring these themes through many different lenses. That's a genuine strength of the book, and there's beautifully-written interstitials between each story that make it flow much more smoothly than the previous volume – but what the selection and sequencing of stories doesn't do is feel like it's actually going anywhere. The story, and thus the reader, is pretty much in the same place at the end that they were at the beginning, in contrast with the game of escalation that Tales and Romance play. We get whispers of a Civil War, but they really are just whispers, and don't meaningfully integrate into the anthology's final vignette.
More Tales of the City pretty much does its job as a continuation to its predecessor, while failing to be a true follow-up. Future anthologies in this series look to have stronger throughlines, so with any luck Obverse refines its craft over time, but with this particular installment things feel rather aimless. I can't exactly bring myself to dislike it, per se; rather it's just a bit unremarkable, which is perhaps worse. At any rate, its middling quality means that it retains one memorable trait from the diverse and unpredictable first anthology: it's something I never expected The City of the Saved to be.
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