I saw the cover of this book at a book sale and I fell for it, hard. It’s a compilation of “genre” short stories: westerns, sci-fi, horror, crime, etc. The reason for my instant need to own? Contributing authors include: Michael Chabon (who also edited), Elmore Leonard, Neil Gaiman, Nick Hornby, Stephen King, Michael Crichton (who sadly contributed a rather lame tale), Dave Eggers, Harlan Ellison, and more. Love at first sight, I’ll tell you. It mostly lived up to my expectations as well. The majority […]
A [not-so-good], seriously old-fashioned romance novel
When I first bought my Kindle, I was very excited about the free books available on Amazon. I spent a lot of time of looking through the reviews and downloading classics that were no longer protected by copyright. Then I promptly forgot about them. The lure of new books and the pressure of library deadlines were more than enough to distract me. A Voice in the Wilderness [published sometime between 1913 and 1918, according to the internet] by Grace Livingston Hill was one of these […]
Gritty fantasy western, with some surprises along the way.
I don’t really like reading Westerns. I don’t really like reading action stories. I don’t really seek out violent stories. And the last time Joe Abercrombie had a female protagonist (Best Served Cold) I was ambivalent about her, and that book in general. Red Country features all of those things, so I was a bit wary about it, to say the least. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up for a while yet, but I’d had such a fun time reading Half a King and The Heroes […]
As told by a dead bunny and a butterfly
This book is mysterious, intervowen, beautiful, almost childish in its narrative, but definitely not in plot. It is a story told in past tense between a skeleton of a rabbit and an orange butterfly traveling across an unknown place. The rabbit tells the story of Sissy; a young girl with two different colored eyes. She travels with a man named fox from city to city, earning a living as story tellers. In one of the towns a man gives Sissy quite an important piece of […]
Dear Authors of the World: ‘Dangerous’ doesn’t have to mean ‘Femme Fatale Sex Stripper.’ There are other options.
This was pretty good for an anthology, but I really prefer longer stories, as it really takes a talented author to make me care for characters in such a short period of time, or to have a plot immediately interesting enough to trump my interest in the characters. Short stories also tend more towards the self-important and annoying. Anyway, this was worth it just for the Martin and Sanderson stories alone, and there were several others I really enjoyed as well including ones from Robin […]
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