This was an entertaining collection of stories. As with any anthology, some of the stories I found really enjoyable, while others I rather skimmed through and could have done without. Either way this is a collection I would recommend to others.

I liked a couple of these, particularly AC Wise and AK Bennett's stories. But overall I wasn't super invested, and it was those few greats that kept me reading until the end.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for granting me free access to the advanced digital copy of this book.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free advanced copy of this book to read and review.

<i>Review copy provided by publisher and Netgalley. All opinions my own.</i>

<i>The Other Side of Never</i> is a collection of short stories by well-known authors in the science fiction genre. The various stories about the enchanting world of Peter Pan and Neverland but with a modern twist. Some of the stories are sweet, whereas others are gritty bringing readers into worlds that are the exact opposite of Neverland.

In Lavie Tidhar’s “A Visit to Kensington Gardens”, a boy named Peter hangs out in a college classroom, says goodbye to an old Wendy, and desperately searches for his shadow who has escaped. I really liked this short story which shows Peter returning to the City of London and encounters more than one old friend.

In ”Manic Pixie Girl,” written by AC Wise, Tinkerbell or “Bell” feeds off of men almost like a vampire at night. Her friend Dee often picks up the pieces when Bell blacks out or when she accidentally kills one of her prey. You see, Bell hunts men who hurt women. Especially those who use trickery or lies to get what they want. Manic Pixie Girl is an electric short story, with vibrant descriptions of how Bell’s fairy dust is her ultimate weapon against those who would hurt the innocent.

In “And On ’til Morning” the little soul of a child wanders through a strange forest unsure of where it is. There the little soul meets a bird with the face of a boy who politely questions the little soul. He indicates that the soul has reached the end of life but there is nothing to fear- that this is a realm where the lost should get to live, feast, dance and so much more.

My absolute favorite story of The Other Side of Never is A.K. Benedict’s “The Shadow Stitcher.” A couple mourn the loss of their son Murphy who was kidnapped and the wife encounters a strange woman named Wendy Darling who wants to make a deal. If she allows Wendy to stitch her shadow onto her body she will get her son back. The woman allows Wendy to do so and is reunited with her son. Murphy has nightmares every night but the couple who are determined to get back to their normal lives, encourage him to talk about his time being missing. When Wendy comes to collect her debt, the woman must give in or lose everything for good. “The Shadow Stitcher” is a proper creepy time with Wendy in a role that we almost never see in a person who is anything but motherly.

Overall <I>The Other Side of Never</i> is a book of intriguing tales of the characters within the Peter Pan world. I found that the majority of the stories borders on horror or science fiction turning the mostly innocent characters of JM Barrie’s world into predators or worse. While most of the stories are great there are a few that miss or are so confusing that you don't quite know what Peter Pan character the story is about.

What in the ever loving did I just read??
I thought this was a simple retelling and or a Peter Pan referenced story but my oh my. It was thoroughly surprising and it sonmany good ways too.

I will not spoil the others but I don't know why this is not viral yet?!

"The Other Side of Never: Dark Tales from the World of Peter & Wendy" is a fascinating and creative collection of dark stories based on J. M. Barrie's timeless classics about Neverland and Peter Pan. This collection of short stories was put together by the skilled team of Marie O'Regan and Paul Kane. It includes stories by well-known authors of fantasy, science fiction, and horror.

As readers travel through twisted and reimagined versions of well-known people and places, they will be intrigued. Each story adds a new layer of depth and mystery to the world of Peter and Wendy. There are murder cases in the strange Neverland, students at a school for Peters, and a desperate search for a lost shadow.


With stories by Lavie Tidhar, Claire North, Kirsty Logan, and other authors, this collection shows a wide range of writing styles and creative ideas. The authors do a great job of taking readers to dark futures, dirty London streets, and creepy landscapes that will keep them reading until the wee hours of the morning.

"The Other Side of Never" is a must-read for people who love J. M. Barrie's famous stories and who like dark and creative takes on old tales. Each story in this collection is a gem in its own right, with new ideas and twists that will leave readers spellbound and wanting more. No matter if you like fantasy, horror, or science fiction, this collection of short stories will take you to the darker side of Neverland in a fun and rewarding way.


***A big thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.***

I am someone who loves the idea of reimagining Disney stories, and I found this Anthology to be no different. This compilation of short stories had everything ranging from horror to fantastical elements with everything in between. There were a couple of stories I loved a little more such as "No Such Place" but I overall found the collection to be wildly entertaining and imaginative. Overall I really enjoyed!

I got to read The Other Side of Never: Dark Tales from the World of Peter & Wendy. This book is a collection of short stories that lean towards the classic source material of Peter Pan more with a lot of great references to the original tales from Barrie as well as other public domain stories that have been written regarding the boy who never grew up. I really enjoyed seeing the different takes that this book presented with a lot of new things to consider regarding who Peter Pan is as a character where they even presented him in the present day. This book is definitely not for everyone if you prefer your more light-hearted takes but for those who want a different side in a modern fairy tale collection, I highly suggest it, and I now want to check out the Wonderland collection that the editor team of Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane, who brought these authors together, published before this. The Other Side of Never: Dark Tales from the World of Peter & Wendy is available now physically and digitally.

Peter Pan is a beloved character in my house, so I was really excited to read this anthology. I found most of the stories to be very well done twists on the Peter Pan mythos, with a diverse variety of genres and styles, some rather dark, and some at odds thematically with the other stories in the book. My favorite from them all is "Chasing Shadows" by Cavan Scott, which uses 1980s pop culture references to bring Peter Pan into the modern era and invoke nostalgia that made me really connect to it. Overall it's a great collection of tales for Neverland fans.

Turns out “Dark Tales from the World of Peter & Wendy” is a pretty broad summary of this short story collection. As in, I was expecting a mixture of Peter and the Starcatchers (a childhood favourite) and Christina Henry, but these ‘dark tales’ often just left me feeling sad and flat.

It’s hard to review short stories because I could honestly give you a completely different rating and review for each short story (there are nearly twenty of them), not to mention, different stories will always resonate with different people. Yet, I was surprised by the consistent inclusion of graphic violence, drugs and crime that either worked unbelievably well or managed to be completely overdone or misused to fit that ‘dark’ description.

‘No Such Place’ by Paul Finch was one example that used the gritty setting of a policeman in post-world-war London and a brutal string of murders to create an actual dark tale that was impacted by the story of Peter Pan and explored the meaning found in it while still remaining captivating and heartfelt. Whereas A. C. Wise's ‘Manic Pixie Girl’ followed an addict FMC in a self-pitying narrative as she continued to make life difficult for someone who cared about her. I respect that there’s a place for this form of drug abuse exploration, I genuinely finished it feeling exhausted and sad and wondering what actually was the point of this inclusion in this collection apart from classing drugs as ‘dark’.

There were others I enjoyed whilst I potentially wouldn’t even class them as dark, such as Gama Ray Martinez's ‘Silver Hook’ because ghost pirates (love it) and it held a fun origin twist. Or ‘The Reeds Remember, by Juliet Marillier because of the drawn parallels between Greek gods (always here for it) and our favourite fictional characters, although there are mentions of potential rape in this one.

Finally, amongst this range of stories, there were definitely interesting psychologically heavy themes, but often, whilst I could acknowledge what the author was trying to do, a lot of it went over my head and just left me frustrated. Such as, ‘The Other Side of Never’ by Edward Cox, which had an interesting premise but felt overcomplicated and hard to follow. Although, this again, is also a reflection of personal taste.

Overall, it’s a mixed collection and averaged out as three stars, despite having great ones. I always enjoy a retelling (less heavy on this aspect in the collection) or a deeper exploration of a classic story but this was challenging at times.

"Grown-up tales inspired by the legend of a boy who never grew up." Which, yes, can occasionally feel like parodies of the gritty rework - the Lost Boys as a boy band with an abusive manager, the South London serial killer story, or Neverland under military occupation. Others have a solid idea that doesn't quite come off, like Claire North's A School For Peters. Its vision of a stratified society where Peters are taught to dream big, get away with murder, throw tantrums if boring Johns and Michaels try to bog them down with details, is a brilliantly scathing gloss on our own ruling class, as too the bit where the poor are blamed for their own failure to imagine themselves better fed. But the vision's gender-essentialist, Handmaid's Tale aspects betray it as a product of the Johnson era, and while he was undoubtedly a boy who wouldn't grow up, Liz Truss' brief reign (and dogged attempts at a comeback) surely shows that women are just as capable of policy which might as well rely on everyone clapping really hard.

My favourites, unsurprisingly, tended to be the writers whose presence drew me to the collection in the first place. Lavie Tidhar isn't the only contributor to pick up on the Peter Pan story's vampire parallels, but he tells it very well; Anna Smith Spark channels some of the same inherent horror of parenthood which gave her recent A Woman Of The Sword such nightmare vigour, while also finding the unexpected intersection of JM Barrie and TS Eliot. And Robert Shearman does that very him thing of presenting a narrator who gradually, unwittingly reveals just how dreadful he is, but then fucking the poor bastard over with a reveal so cruel as to leave you wincing all the same. And even with the stories which didn't wow me, the baseline quality is mostly high, though given they're all drawing on the same slim corpus, there's an inevitable thematic overlap which means the collection would probably benefit from being dipped into with decent gaps between stories, rather than doing what I did and going through it at a greater pace because of the sense of obligation that usually attends a Netgalley ARC. All of which said, even within the available elements, it is noticeable how many of the contributors keep picking up the same toys; I can understand writers in the 2020s being wary of doing too much with Tiger Lily, but only in the last story did I realise how much some of the others might have been enlivened by including a great living rug of a Newfoundland.

Some of the tales in this book were very good and insightful or playful and others were boring and disgusting.

It sounds stereotypical but a lot of the men’s writing in this anthology seemed to include vulgarity for the sake of being vulgar. It often added nothing to the plot and made the writing look bad. The misogyny in some of the tales was off the charts and not enjoyable to read.

I understand it is a collection of dark tales but I think some of the writers could take hints from others. Claire North’s School for Peters highlights issues of the Peter and Wendy dynamic and how women are molded to serve men, including sex in an actual useful way, unlike some of the male writers in this work.

Manic Pixie Girl is another good example of how to write about sex without treating women like scum, even with Tinker Bell as a junkie character.

Unfortunately I found most of these tales a chore to read but the ones that were good, really did make me think about their interpretations and the subtext of Peter and Wendy by Barrie.

The Other Side of Never is a short story collection featuring tales relating to Peter Pan, some more closely, some only very loosely adjacent to J. M. Barries book. Some stories take us on adventures with characters we know, exploring what happens to them after the original story or what happened to them while other characters were doing other things, some stories take elements or lore from the original story and twist and turn them into other things.
This is a great read if you like the original Peter Pan tale. Of course, since it's a wild array of different stories and different types of stories, not all will be to everyone's taste, but I am very sure that there's something in here for everyone.. I dind't love all of the stories, but I enjoyed most and really really loved a few, to my surprise mostly those that are only vaguely related to the source material. I found the stories really well selected to work with each other and all different enough that they each brought a new bit to the table.

I received an ARC of this book thanks to NetGalley and publisher Titan Books in exchange for an honest review.

This is such a solid premise for an anthology and I was really excited to read it. It feels like there's been a recent trend of 'Peter Pan but creepy', with my absolute favourite Lost Boy by Christina Henry standing out among the crowd. I am pleased to say that The Other Side of Never is a worthy contributor.

As with any anthology, you get the good ones and the not so good ones. I think this starts off a little weak with many of the initial stories being confusingly told or hard to follow. Sometimes a story would end and I wouldn't get what the point was as nothing had really happened, and these were the most frustrating. But after the first few, the quality improved greatly for me and there were some real enjoyable finds here.

I would say my favourites were A School for Peters (kind of disjointed and not the best told, but I liked the idea behind it) No Such Place (a fantastic thematic interpretation of the source material and one of the easiest to follow) and The Lost Boys Monologues (again, disjointed but had some good ideas behind it).

Overall, I enjoyed this anthology a lot and I am looking forward to reading the Alice in Wonderland one even more so now. I do think that in general, this series of anthologies does need a bit more editing. It does seem to be a consistent problem that stories seem either unfinished or near incoherent, and it is a shame when some of them are so enjoyable. Hopefully they will continue to improve

Overall Rating: 4/5 stars

This was a very unique anthology. Each story explores Peter Pan--the boy who wanted to never grow up as an adult. It's an interesting thing to explore and each author showcases a different take. Darker stories bordering on evil, projections and reflections of bigger pictures. A must read for ALL readers.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.
A collection of rather twisted Peter Pan tales. I love twists on old fairytales so I enjoyed this book.

Peter Pan is a very strange character. As a child he is all unknowable and adventure loving. He does seem sulky but hey grown ups are annoying. As a grown up though I find him and his desire to never grow up and his callousness a little alarming. Its not surprising many retellings have explored this enigmatic character and in the new fascinating anthology The Other Side of Never – Dark tales From the World of Peter & Wendy the editors Marie O’ Regan and Paul Kane assemble a host of great authors with their own interpretations to make us ponder if Pan is good, evil, or just plain humanity reflected back at us?

Amongst the many tales I enjoyed were: -

A Visit to Kensington Gardens by Lavie Tidhar – this story plays with the history of the period; the other stories that Pan and J M Barrie were in conversation with as well as some of the social history. It’s a tale of growing up and also growing old and learning to say goodbye. Perhaps not supernatural but more a ponder all childhoods end as do lives. Its haunting and bittersweet.

Manic Pixie Girl by A C Wise – this is an earthy, bloody tale of a character from Neverland stuck in our world and has to learn to survive and feed. Fantasy and crime noir collide; and it works because of our narrator’s voice and introspection how they have got to where they now are in their lives. Very entertaining and surprising.

Fear of the Pan Child by Robert Shearman – this is a great disturbing tale of childhood and adulthood. Widower talks about his moving back home and his memories of a person he cannot name. This tale tells us a lot about the main character in his selfishness and explains why he is the way he is. It combines grief, loss and love but also holds this sense of menace slowly encircling the main character. We all can become a lost child even when we get old. One of my favourites and its wonderfully creepy too!

And On ‘Til Morning by Laura Mauro – here the more mythic parts of the tale get explored. A lost soul in a haunting forest talk to another presence. This tale is using Peter Pan’s attitude to death and finds perhaps another explanation as to what Neverland actually is. Its mysterious and yet hopeful and a great piece of writing.

The Other Side of Never by Edward Cox – a brilliant gritty version of Neverland that imagines humanity conquered Neverland to survive a unknown disaster and now some revolutionaries are making a last gasp attempt to set things right. Cox merges the language of the post-apocalyptic action drama with escaped prisoners and mirror masked soldiers and casts haunting images of dead fairies, ancient legends and more. Its quite ingenious and feels very fresh. Another favourite.

The Lost Boys Monologues by Kirsty Logan – this tale imagines the Lost Boys as a short lived but super famous boyband. Each member tells us their secrets in a confessional; power, fame, love and shame all combine to create a memorably dark tales about the loss of innocence having to play the same roles every day cast on them all. A really interesting play on the subject.

A School For Peters – Another favourite and this dark tale imagines a world of Peters. Arrogant, never grow up and believe they have a natural ability o lead and lie without consequence. I loved how this fits a certain type of UK class and some would say particular group of PMs. It is a vicious satire about the ruling classes that Pan can be seen to represent and where that has got us. It also explores control as one of the Wendys is subject to a Peter’s attempts to control her forever. Inventive, thoughtful and has a lot of bite.

Chasing Shadows by Cavan Scott – this imagines a bit of Neverland magic lore transposed to a 1980s estate. Its very Stranger Things in use of popular culture references and yet works because the kids feel real and the growing threat after one of their number loses their shadow makes it all feel new and also threatening. Really good storytelling.

Saturday Morning by Anna Smith Spark – this is a dark tale of growing up as a man face being a parent, lover and a man in a time when it was a society controlled where sex and love were viewed as sinful and going to war is seen as a fun adventure. It is exploring the strange masculinity that Peter Pan pushes as to what a man should be and finding the hollowness underneath. Very disquieting.

Never Was Born His Equal by Premee Mohamed – Refreshingly in this collection takes a more positive spin to Peter and Wendy, as a strange monster attacks Neverland. It explores a different explanation for who Peter is and also explores the power of being open to your past. It’s a really powerful tale and plays with reality and dreamscapes in a very smart way as the secrets f Peter get exposed.

The Shadow Stitcher by AK Benedict – this reads almost like a contemporary thriller as young parents ponder their missing seven-year-old after nearly two years and then a strange woman whispers she can find them. Here Wendy becomes something sinister, and Benedict fills the tale with a growing sense of foreboding that a high price is to come and a delicious final line.

And that’s just a sample prepare for family secrets, crime scenes and many other tales to ponder what never growing up and Never Land really mean. I loved the collection’s ability to play with the concept and the tales all manage to run the emotions from happy to grief to fear with ease. A collection I highly recommend!

3.5 Stars

Some truly dark Peter Pan retellings. I'm a big fan of retellings and Peter Pan so I've read quite a few, these ones weren't my favourite but definitely interesting and worth the read.

So this is an anthology or compilation of books twisting the classic tale of Peter Pan. With any collection of this nature you are going to encounter a mix of writing styles, genres, and reactions and this was not the exception to that. You can find science fiction, fantasy, even bits of horror mixed in all with dashes of the classic tale we knew and loved as children. That being said, they all deviated drastically from the origin which is expected but some of the stories felt unrelated and if there hadn’t been similar names I might never have known they were inspired by Peter Pan and Neverland. I, personally, wasn’t obsessed with any of these stories or characters and despite all the potential it showed I was not in love with any aspect of it.
I know this seems harsh but please if this is something you truly enjoy and you don’t mind drastic variation from the source then you should certainly give it a try. With the mix contained it holds appeal for a variety of people and audiences. I personally wish there had been more elements of Neverland but not every story is for everyone and that doesn’t discount it in any way!