First, let me tell you the hook for the short stories in this collection: High School cheerleaders (various squad combinations) fight monsters, aliens, and evil gods while also cheering for their school’s football team and participating in cheer competitions.
Now let me try and explain the format/setup of this book as best I can by using some of the author’s own words. This quote is from the forward of the collection where Seanan McGuire writes about growing up in the 80s and loving sandbox novels; “I loved the idea of linked stories that moved a bigger story slowly along without being a strict serial.” This pretty much sums up the stories in this collection. Some characters reoccur, some references to other adventures, and some plot lines take a few stories to resolve. But in the end, these are written as short stories and each is meant to stand mostly alone.
I feel a reader’s mileage may vary a bit because these are short stories, and while they are by the same author and mostly the same cast, each story is a kind of a pint-sized adventure. I know my enjoyment of the stories varied a bit—I love short stories! It was just different for me to read a collection of short stories about the same characters because the nature of the format meant everything was always happening so fast.
So what are these short stories about exactly? What are The Fighting Pumpkins? Well, they are a group of high school (well high school-ish in some cases) cheerleaders as noted in the first paragraph. They do cheerleader things – but they also you know fight monsters. Some aren’t one hundred percent human (the squad leader for most of the stories is a half-vampire) and some aren’t human (yes, there is a zombie cheerleader).
The makeup of the squad varies a bit between some of the stories. Again to use the author’s own words (there are small author notes before some of the stories that provide some background) “The Fighting Pumpkins were originally intended to be a sort of horror movie comedy setup, with the entire squad dyeing at the end of every adventure…” So you do see some different squads, but the main one is led by Jude, a half-vampire, Laurie who can make anyone do anything she asks, a group of girls who are one mind between several bodies, and so on. So you follow these characters’ adventures the most, but these are short stories, so characterization isn’t always the biggest thing. You do see some changes, and one of my favourite stories in the collection (“Compete Me”) provides some backstory to one of the squad in a truly devastating way.
Full disclosure this short story collection fed into the fact that in my childhood/teenage years, I had a steady diet of Sailor Moon and Buffy, which left me longing for stories of teenage girls standing as a line of defence against the weird and arcane and the otherworldly. This might have predisposed me to enjoy this collection as much as I did.
I think my biggest complaint about the book was the words ‘green’ and ‘orange’ (naturally these are the colours of the Fighting Pumpkins squad, I mean –what other colours would they use?) get used a lot. I was getting a bit sick of seeing those words on my e-reader by the time I was done with this collection. Weird gripe I know! But really those colours are mentioned a lot.