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

The stories in this Alice in Wonderland–themed weird fantasy anthology, the latest from renowned editor Datlow, blur together into a sea of Victoriana, edginess for the sake of edginess, and dream logic. Most of them have characters (or archetypes or jobs or horrible monsters) called Alice, which is unsurprising but makes distinguishing them hard. The few bright spots include Ysabeau S. Wilce’s “The Queen of Hats,” which revels in the Carrollian nature of theatrical lingo (“ ‘In the theater right is left and left is right,’ the dodo said indignantly”), and Richard Bowes’s “Some Kind of Wonderland,” which evokes a nonexistent N.Y.C.-set 1960s Alice movie in a gorgeously cinematic fashion. But the rest leave readers feeling like they’ve been down this rabbit hole before. (Dec.)