The Cóyotl Awards Anthology

For my full review, story by story, you can go check it out here.

For those not in the know, the Cóyotl Awards is an annual award run by the Furry Writer's Guild since 2011 to recognize “excellence in anthropomorphic literature”. These works can only be nominated and voted upon by members of the FWG (even if the authors are not part of the guild themselves) instead of the general public, kinda making them like the Oscars but for furry literature.

This anthology, edited by the late Fred Pattern, collects both winners and nominees for the Best Short Story category from the first seven years of the Cóyotl Awards and represents pretty much the whole spectrum of furry literature. Do you want stories with feral characters? You have them. Do you prefer anthros? You have them. How about comedy, horror, sci-fi, or fantasy? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Among the 7 winner stories and 9 nominees, we have stuff such as the following.

For starters, there's “The Canoe Race” by Daniel and Mary E. Lowd, winner of Best General Short Story for 2011 (only year when this and Best Mature Short Story were separate categories). First published in Stories of Camp Rainfurrest, this is a typical camping story with handicrafts, fire pits, and, yes, canoe races but with the twist being that the campers themselves are animals, and by that I don't mean anthropomorphic animals like in some television shows, but instead real, feral animals. So, you get to see birds doing macramé, bears singing, and even raccoons trying to bribe bobcats with shiny objects. The descriptions of the animals-imitating-humans are short and sweet, with the story as a whole having a lighthearted and wholesome tone–a rare sight in this collection.

Next comes “Best of Breed” by Renee Carter Hall, winner of Best Mature Short Story for 2011. First published in Allaso volume 1: Shame, this is a coming-of-age story about the competitive world of Animal Shows but with the almost opposite twist of the previous story as Mina, the main character of this story, is an anthro cat and therefore a sentient creature. At first, everything goes fine for our protagonist, but her world starts crumbling apart once she starts getting into bigger and fancier shows, not in small part by the way Shawn, her human handler, treats her and her sister. The only story in this anthology with any sort of sexual content, though tame and non-explicit, Hall's way of handling Mia's journey into adulthood was gripping and did not let go until the final parts of it.

Accompanying the previous storie is “Rearview” by Sean Silva, nominee for Best Short Story 2012. First published in Allaso volume 2: Shame, this is also the first horror piece in the anthology. Ben, a troubled pig on the run, meets an aggressive wolf on the road after his car breaks down in this short story about the dangers of hitchhiking. From the onset, we can tell that something's not right in all of this, and Silva's handle of the suspense carries the story perfectly until its inevitable outcome.

“Jackalope Wives” by Ursula Vernon, aka T. Kingfisher, is the winner of Best Short Story for 2014. First published in Apex Magazine issue 56, this is the story of a boy, his grandma, and a jackalope girl that was caught by the former, or did he? In the end, it's up to Grandma Harken to fix the boy's mistakes and free the jackalope from the pain brought upon by her own blood. Another story that does not feel as “furry” as it could be, but that also makes it up by its modern take on an age old myth.

As mentioned near the beginning of this review, pretty much everything you may want to see is here in one way or another with some very few exceptions, and the fact that these were curated by writers and editors themselves means that you can be sure of the overall quality of every story represented. If you're new to furry literature as a whole, this is definitely the book for you. If you're not, even if you've already read all of these, you should try getting a copy too. The quality is there, the variety is there, and you can see how the storytelling styles and the fandom evolved throughout the decade.