This is one of the many, many volumes in Carroll & Graf's "Mammoth" series of short fiction compendiums. (Other volumes have held mysteries, vampire stories, Sherlock Holmes stories and many, many other subjects.) Basically, it's 500 pages of comedic fantasy, sci-fi and horror tales, and as you would have to expect with a book of this sort, the quality varies wildly. Some -- such as Tom Holt's "Pizza To Go," Neil Gaiman's "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" and R.A. Lafferty's "Been a Long, Long Time" are fantastic reads. Others are almost painful in their lack of humor. Most fall somewhere in that gray area in-between. As someone who likes reading anthologies in the hopes of finding new authors, it was worth a read for me, and I've already read one of the three sequels (The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy II). I intend to pick up the other two (The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy and The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy) as well -- I expect those, like the other two, will vary in quality, but to me it's worth slagging through some of the boring stories to find the gems.