Tuesday, February 23, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Anthology Review: Dying With Her Cheer Pants On by Seanan McGuire

 


Dying With Her Cheer Pants On is a 2020 collection of a series of short fiction works by Seanan McGuire, best known for her October Daye, InCryptid, and Wayward Children series (and a lot else).  The anthology collects her stories that feature the Flying Pumpkins, a group of cheerleaders who are forced to face off with the supernatural, the extra-dimensional horrors, and basically everything else monstrous.  The collection includes what appear to be three brand new stories - two that are essentially an introduction to the rest of the collection and one that is a full brand new story - and otherwise collects stories published from 2010-2020, with explanatory interstitials in between each story.  

And it's a fun if inessential collection of stories.  The Pumpkins are a fun group of characters, led by a half-vampire girl, featuring girls of various degrees of supernatural ability, who at first are terrified of disappearing like nearly every prior squad but soon come to just shrug off and fight through the latest supernatural disaster of the day.  With the exception of one story, which is novella length and takes up over a third of the volume, the stories are just short enough to never outstay their welcome too.  Even so, the stories are never quite as humorous as they seem like they should be, and when put together back to back to back, the stories do feel often a bit repetitive and without tension.  

The Fighting Pumpkins are a creation of Seanan McGuire from back in 2010 ("Dying with Her Cheer Pants On"), which were originally meant to be a series of stories about a group of cheerleaders fighting various world-ending cosmic/supernatural/alien threats, defeating them and dying in the process - and then being replaced by a new group in the next story.  McGuire wrote one story (the first in this collection) that followed this scheme....and then in her second collection of cheerleaders, she found herself loving them too much to kill them off.  So after that first story, for the most part (not counting one flashback story), we're dealing with the same collection of characters in a series of stories put in chronological order for this collection.  The collection includes two stories that seem to be new that are essentially an origin story for the final pumpkin group which are fun and fine if probably unnecessary, before getting on to the meat of this collection: the stories that deal with the Pumpkins' actual adventures.  

And well, the stories are fun and fine and some of them hit harder than others.  The newest story, "Compete Me", is for example really well done, and hits the emotional beats hard - it's mostly not a funny story (except in the way that all horror stories have funny quips every now and then), but it's a strong and brutal one.  Gimme a "Z", featuring zombies vs the cheerleaders is rather fun and cute, as is "Fiber" and "Away Game" - which I'd actually read previously - is a fun mashup of the Pumpkins and classic Cosmic Horror.  The main cast - Jude, captain and daughter of a vampire; Laurie, who is good natured and bubbly and also possesses the power to make anyone do what they say; Heather, who gets turned into the zombie; Colleen, geek girl who researches the records of past doomed squads; and Marti, who possesses super strength - are all really easy to like and play off each other rather well in each of these stories.  

Still, with the possible exception of "Compete Me," none of these stories really make a big lasting mark, at least not for me, especially in comparison to McGuire's other short fiction work.  The novella, "Turn the Year Around," is melancholy and decent but goes on way too long till its conclusion which I don't really think worked, and the reading the stories one after the other is kind of inadvisable, as they get a little repetitive - Pumpkins meet new threat, one or more of their abilities comes in handy to deal with it, all along with some school and more importantly "team spirit" leading their way.  The stories do not all follow the same formula and are original enough on their own, but I don't really think they're best served by being put together back to back, where their individual merits begin to get lost in the mass.  

So yeah, fine fun anthology, and I'd be happy to see one of these stories in a larger anthology of other authors' works, and worth a read if you get your hands on this anthology - but not one that I'd recommend you go out and buy right away.  
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