Fantasy Gone Wrong, edited by Greenberg and Koren

This was a really funny group of short stories. Everything related here is a twist on the iconic fantasy and fairy tales with which we all grew up. For instance, Goblin Lullaby by Jim C. Hines tells of a classic battle between villainous goblins and heroic elves, but from the goblin point-of-view. Dragonslayer by Jana Paniccia is a knight versus a witch and dragon with a hilarious twist at the end. The Murder of Mr. Wolf by Josepha Sherman was the most clever, telling how the detective agency of Beau Peep and Marie Gobeur (gobeur is French for sheep) solved the murder of Mr. Wolf. Michael Jasper’s Meet the Madfeet was the funniest of the bunch, set in a thinly-disguised Middle-earth and focusing on a wizard known as “Greybeard’s replacement” that keeps complaining about the little fur-feet. This is a fun-filled collection that skewers the fantasy genre in very inventive ways. Good stuff.

First Sentence (from the Introduction):

Late one evening, my husband and I were talking, bouncing ideas off one another about our future and looking back to see if our lives had turned out to be the way we had tried to plan it.