Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are profoundly weird, mixing fairy-tale storytelling and horror with ease, wandering down unexpectedly odd and magical avenues that seem almost drug-fueled in their frivolity and strangeness. In those books, he created the perfect sandbox for other authors to frolic in, one that offers delights both delicious and terrifying, depending on who’s shaping the sand.

Mad Hatters and March Hares collects impressive names from the fantasy genre and lets them loose in Carroll’s charming playground, allowing them to craft their own spin on the Alice mythos.

Unfortunately, this seemed to become a contest to see who could outweird Carroll, and most of the stories tend toward the dark and sinister, rather than the lighter trappings that underlined the world of Wonderland. The fun and whimsy of the originals is mostly gone here, swapped out for twisted reimaginings of Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and the Bandersnatch.

Make no mistake, there is immense creativity at play here, and these authors are on top of their game in terms of storytelling and inventiveness. It’s just darker than you might anticipate.