I have now reached the end of I Didn't Quite Make It to Oz. The final story is "Potholes" by Shannon Delane Wiley, and it may have the most unusual premise of any story in either of these collections. It turns out that the Yellow Brick Road is alive, and wants to get revenge on Dorothy! Let's just say that roads are not deep thinkers, and it takes an encounter with a winged monkey for the road to find out some of the flaws in its plans. It didn't make it into the original collection, I Should Have Stayed in Oz, just because it wasn't quite as strong as the stories that did make it in, and Wiley is a new writer without a fan base to help sell copies.
Overall, I was just as pleased reading the stories in I Didn't Quite Make It to Oz as I was with I Should Have Stayed in Oz, as both had clever ideas and interesting twists. Too many stories in both collections, however, felt like just the beginning, and there was a lot more story to tell. I am glad that the editor, Selina Rosen, at least found a way to publish the ones that didn't quite make it.
And with that, my well of new Oz stories has dried up, and I have no more to read. I'm going to take a few weeks' break here, but when I get back to it, I have some older ones to get back to, many of which I haven't blogged about, so I will probably share whatever I discover. But I also hope that someone comes up with more ideas for Oz short stories (besides Oziana, the annual literary journal of the International Wizard of Oz Club), as I think there's a lot of potential there.
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