Samhain Publishing, $3.50, ISBN 1-59998-676-0
Paranormal Romance, 2007

A Fairy Special Gift is a short story revolving around our heroine Meara Magee who has the ability to see and communicate with fairies. The fairies in this story are not the nauseatingly sweet Tinkerbelle type though, they are more like mischievous little imps who have given Meara enough hard time that she has a few big flyswatters at hand at all time. One day these fairies decide to give Meara a present – a man – and therefore Meara finds herself an injured man.

If he is a normal person, Jamison Murphy, our biker dude hero, must think he’s in an Irish-flavored episode of The Twilight Zone when he comes to consciousness to find himself encountering banshees, fairies, and of course Meara. But there is more to Jamison than meets the eye, so Meara is going to find herself in an adventure of sorts best described as “when the DEA meets the fairies”.

This is an amusing tale with ample whimsical and quirky aspects of the plot coming together very well. The main characters fall in love too quickly but that’s to be expected given the length of the story. Jamison is a charming fellow while Meara can be most amusing when it comes to expressing her exasperation with those annoying fairies. These two characters have a nice thing going in the story.

For a short story, A Fairy Special Gift manages to be well-paced and complete. I don’t feel that the characters are grossly underwritten or that the story feels like a much longer tale compressed into a shorter length. Instead, this one is a most charming and quirky short read that entertains me very well.