"Reality is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there." -John Barth
by Nathan Ballingrud "Mankind had acquired an appetite for dying; doctors were merely shephards to the process." Consisting of 9 short stories, North American Lake Monsters won the 2013 Shirley Jackson award for best collection in May 2014. Particularly notable is the fact it beat Michael Marshall Smith's Everything You Need for the award, a... Continue Reading →
by Karl Edward Wagner “I was your friend, Curtiss.” “Writer’s don’t’ have friends. Only deadlines.” This is an excellent, dark collection that comes at you from an unsuspected angle, often due to a sense of gravitas permeating the stories. A black and white picture early in the book reveals about 9,000 truths of the writer... Continue Reading →
by Charles Beaumont “I just lie awake at night and thank God that I’m bald.” Making your way through this gigantic book brings with it a revelation. You are not reading a book, you're staring directly into the imagination of one of our best speculative fiction writers, one of our best situational thinkers. As the... Continue Reading →
by Brian James Freeman “Screaming wouldn’t open doors, wouldn’t extinguish flames, and it certainly wouldn’t put the demon back in the basement.” This is a concise collection of short stories, like Dreamlike States and Weak and Wounded, and packs a nice punch into a small package. More Than Midnight consists mainly of traditional horror, dealing... Continue Reading →
by Al Sarrantonio “Ain’t you gonna ask me why I shot her in the back?” I said . . . “Because her front was too far away!” Here we have another solid collection from Mr. Sarrantonio, and while containing a number of excellent tales it falls a little short of his previously reviewed collection, Toybox.... Continue Reading →
by Dean Koontz “You don’t have to make the world peaceful,” she said. “It is to begin with. You just have to learn not to disturb things.” Mr. Koontz has an entertaining and thoroughly enjoyable, worth every penny and then some, but not often eye-opening. If you're a reader of his novels but haven't seen... Continue Reading →
by Clive Barker Originally published in ’97 as part of Douglas Winter’s Millennium, the stories ‘Men and Sin’ and ‘A Moment at the River’s Heart’ make up this release. Two men, 1,000 years apart, attempt to locate and exact revenge upon their spouses’ murderers. That is the plot in its oversimplified form, but laid over... Continue Reading →
by Al Sarrantonio Many folks first actual exposure to Al Sarrantonio's work may be the amazing anthology 999, and that's a very serious collection. If so, your expectations for Toybox should be high. Over the course of this read, and comparing back to that anthology, you may see a unique quality emerging. It's assembly, not... Continue Reading →
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