Dark Screams Three

I just finished reading a review copy of Dark Screams: Volume Three, and I've got to say, this series just seems to keep going downhill.

The book starts off with "The Collected Short Stories of Freddie Prothero," by Peter Straub. This is a fake collection of short stories told as if written by a five-eight year old boy with no grasp of spelling. If reading a series of "stories" rendered into borderline gibberish is something you think you'll like then you might like this story, otherwise you're better off not wasting your time.

Next up come the utterly predictable and sadly disappointing "Group of Thirty" by Jack Ketchum. It's the story of a hardcore horror author who is asked to address a group of wannabe science fiction writers. When he finds the group meeting at a church , it becomes blindingly obvious that this is going to be about a writer who is forced to defend his writing to a bunch of religious nutbags, or face the consequences. The ending of the story borders on being deus ex machina, making it all even less appealing. The main character seems to be a stand in for Ketchum himself, as one of the stories he defends seems to be a thinly veiled version of his own extremely disturbing The Girl Next Door, which makes it not completely crappy, but far from Ketchum's best work.

Next up comes a tale of highschool angst called "Nancy," by Darynda Jones. It's about a teenaged girl who moves to a small town and tries to get to know a misfit girl named Nancy, who is haunted by a ghost. I found the story to be extremely tedious until we got to the twist ending, which actually surprised me.

Story four is "I Love You, Charlie Perason," by Jacquelyn Frank. It's about a disturbed teenage boy who is obsessed with a cheerleader. You can tell after the first paragraph that he's going to end up kidnapping her or something. As with the previous story, I just found it tedious and boring until it gets to a twist ending that I didn't see coming.

The final tale is the only one that I actually enjoyed, "The Lone One and Level Sands Stretch Far Away," by Brian Hodge. It's about a middle-aged married man who has a young woman move in next door. She introduces him to parkour, urban exploration, and thinking about the apocalypse. She also causes trouble between the man and his wife. Despite the horror elements not showing up until near the end of the story, this is my favorite of the lot.

So, this anthology consists of one story I think is terrible, one story I think isn't very good, two stories that are kind of boring but with good endings, and one story that is actually good. I can't help but think that passing on this anthology would be a wise move.

Dark Screams Two

The good folks at Cemetery Dance were nice enough to send me a review copy of Dark Screams: Volume Two for reviewing Dark Screams One. As much as I enjoyed the first volume, I thought number two wasn't anywhere near as good.

The first story in the volume is one of the reprints, "The Deep End," by Robert McCammon. Despite being a reprint, I had never read it, and I enjoyed this tale of a fathers quest for revenge against a terror lurking in a public swimming pool.

The Second story is "Interval," by Norman Prentiss. This one is a bit slower moving, and revolves around people at an airport waiting for word on a plane that is late.  It's a good enough story, especially the big reveal ending.

Next is "If These Walls Could Talk," by Shawntelle Madison. This is a creepy story about people getting a rural house ready for a TV crew, but something strange starts happening. I enjoyed this one, too.

Then we have "The Night Hider," by Graham Masterton. This was probably my favorite story. It revolves around a wardrobe that's haunted by the ghost a horribly burned man.

The final story is another reprint, and it stank so bad that it dragged the rest of the book down. The story in question is "Whatever," by Richard Christian Matheson. I have no idea what this story is even doing in this anthology, as it's not horror by any definition I'm familiar with. There are no ghosts, monsters, aliens, or serial killers. It's just the story of the rise and fall of a mega rock band in the 1970's told through song lyrics, letters, and excerpts of magazine articles. It's long and boring.

I think the ebook edition is worth it just for the first four stories, but you might as well skip the last one.

Dark Screams

I was lucky enough to get a copy of the forthcoming horror anthology Dark Screams: Volume One. It's a really good (short) collection. It's only got five stories, but they're all from fairly well known authors, and they're all good.

The book starts off with its only reprint, "Weeds," by Stephen King. Even if, like me, you haven't read this story before, you still probably know it, because it was used in Creepshow as "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill."  Even if you're familiar with the story from the film, it's still a great read.

The second story is "The Price You Pay" by Kelley Armstrong. It seems to start off as a standard horror trope about two women who get kidnapped and tortured by a psychopath, but it quickly moves into a different direction. I think it might have been my favorite story in the collection.

Story number three is "Magic Eyes," by Bill Pronzini. It's about a man in a mental hospital who claims he's not insane, he didn't murder his wife, and some sort of magic eyes are really responsible. Once again this story starts off seeming like a standard horror trope, but eventually proves to be something different.

The fourth story is Simon Clark's "Murder in Chains," which is about a man who wakes up to find himself chained to a murderous lunatic. Wackiness ensues (and by wackiness, I mean lots of blood and gore).

The final story is Ramsey Campbell's "The Watched," which is about a policeman who seeks revenge against the drug dealers he holds responsible for his daughter's death. Not surprisingly, there is a supernatural twist.

This is a really good anthology, and since it's only available in ebook form, it's cheap, too.

Limbus Inc.: Book II

Limbus, Inc.: Book II has got a really great lineup of contributors. Joe Lansdale is one of my favorite writers. I've rnjoyed eyerything I've read by Jonathan Maberry. I've generally enjoyed Gary Braunbeck's Cedar Hill stories. I've only read a couple of Harry Shannon's books, but I thought they were pretty good. I haven't read anything else by Joe McKinney, but he seems to be reasonably popular.

With that lineup, this book must be good, right? Yes, it and no. As with the previous book, I really don't think it really hangs together very well as a shared world story collection. Limbus is supposed to be a sort of pandimensional employment agency. The problem I have is that in some of the stories Limbus seems to be fairly benevolent, but in others it is utterly malevolent. The stories themselves are mostly good though.

Maberry fan's will probably really enjoy his story, which is a crossover with Sam Hunter (from the previous Limbus book) going to Pine Deep (which Maberry wrote a trilogy about) and teaming up with Joe Ledger (who is the star of Maberry's most popular series).  Joe Lansdale tells a story about a shadow government, a dinosaur hunt, and the Hollow Earth, with Allan Quartermain making an appearance. Gary Braunbecks story, which I found disappointing, was about a librarian who is kidnapped by Limbus and turned into a slightly more psychotic version of James Bond. Harry Shannon's tale is about an alcoholic who gets a job involving time travel and a quest for redemption. Joe McKinney's story is also about an alcoholic on a quest for redemption, only with a ghost instead of time travel.

Realistically, I think most people would be less bothered by Limbus's ambiguous nature than I am, and the stories are really good, so I'd say that you should read this book.

FaceOff

The title of this book is slightly misleading. Instead of being a collection of stories where the characters FaceOff,it most of the stories involve characters teaming up. Of course, TeamUp wouldn't really have been as cool of a title.

As this book was written to benefit the International Thriller Writers, the characters in question are from popular thriller series. At least I assume they're popular. I'm not really all that well read in the genre and mainly picked the book up for the Repairman Jack story and the story with Grayson Pierce of Sigma Force. While most of the stories weren't super great, I generally enjoyed them and will probably try to read the original series the various characters came from.

I might as  well give my thoughts on the individual stories:

"Red Eye" featuring Denis Lehane's Patrick Kenzie and Michael Connely's Harry Bosch - I definitely enjoyed this story of a detective and a cop teaming up to rescue a little girl from a pedophile. It was a good lead off for the book.

"In the Nick of Time" featuring Ian Rankin's John Rebus and Peter Jame's Roy Grace - This one was more of mystery than a thriller. It is about two British cops solving a 50 year old stabbing case after a man confesses on his deathbed. It wasn't as action-filled as I'd expect from a thriller, but it was still good.

"Gaslighted" featuring R. L. Stine's Slappy the Ventriloquist Dummy and Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child's Aloysius Pendergast - I did enjoy this one, but I was rather disappointed by how little a part Slappy played in the story. Still, not having read the Goosebumps books, for all I know he could have just sat there and stared at people in them, too.

"The Laughing Buddha" featuring M. J. Rose's Malachai Samuels and Lisa Gardener's D. D. Warren - This is another one that's a bit more of a mystery than a thriller. It involves the murder of an antiques dealer and reincarnation, which does make for a good story. While I enjoyed it, I don't think the crossover aspect worked that well and almost felt tacked on.

"Surfing the Panther" featuring Steve Martini's Paul Madriani and Linda Fairstein's Alexandra Cooper - Legal thrillers aren't my cup of tea. I did still enjoy it, but not as much as the others.

"Rhymes with Prey" featuring Jeffery Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme and John Sandford's Lucas Davenport - This was definitely my least favorite story in the collection, which is unfortunate as it is also by far the longest story in the collection. I think the length might be part of the issue I had with this, as the story just seemed to drag.

"Infernal Night" featuring F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack and Heather Graham's Michael Quinn - This was the story I was most looking forward to, and while I enjoyed it, it didn't feel very Repairman Jack-ish. I think it might just be that Jack works best in New York, and this is set in New Orleans.

"Pit Stop" featuring Raymond Khoury's Sean Reilly and Linwood Barcaly's Glen Garber - This was one of the more fast-paced stories. It involves a car chase, a kidnapped girl, and a deadly bioweapon. It's a good story.

"Silent Hunt" featuring John Lescroart's Wyatt Hunt and T. Jefferson Parker's Joe Trona - While this story starts off slow, it has a lot of action involving Mexican drug traffickers and a gold mine. It's a cool story with an ending I liked a lot.

"The Devil's Bones" featuring Steve Berry's Cotton Malone and James Rollin's Gray Pierce - This is the story I was second most anxious to read, and I actually enjoyed in more than the Repairman Jack story. This is a team up that worked very well, and produced a story with lots of action.

"Good and Valuable Consideration" featuring Lee Child's Jack Reacher and Joseph Finder's Nick Heller - Two thriller heroes walk into a bar ... it sounds like some sort of joke, but it's the premise of this story. It's not a bad story but it's not as actiony as I'd like for the finale of a collection of thrillers.

While the book could have been better, it's still well worth reading, especially since it supports a worthy cause.

The Simon Iff Stories & Other Works

Since I'm trying to do reviews more often, it's time for another one. This time, it's Simon Iff Stories and Other Works by Aleister Crowley. I found it surprisingly enjoyable.

The Simon Iff stories are mysteries, which to be honest reminded me of nothing so much as G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories.Don't get me wrong, Iff and Brown are to very different characters with very different worldviews. However, both of their methods of deduction revolve around am understanding of the darkness of the human soul more than any clue hunting.

There are some problems with the stories. "An Old Head on Young Shoulders" just left me confused. "Not Good Enough" was one of the most racist stories I've ever read. Despite this, I found the collection interesting.

The "and Other Works" from the title is a collection of stories called Golden Twigs based off of Frazer's Golden Bough. I probably would have enjoyed them more if I'd actually read Frazer's book. They aren't bad, but I didn't like them as much as the Iff stories. Still the book is worth getting just for the Simon Iff stories.

Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Abberant

I really want to try to update this blog more often, so I'm going to do something I normally wouldn't--review a book that will probably get me into trouble. No, I don't think reviewing Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant is going to cause NSA thugs to kick my door down, but there is a strong chance that it will lead to my being harassed.

I'm not going to mention this person by name, because he may be an odious, little troll, but he does know how to find mentions of his name on the Internet.  I will mention that he runs "Lake Fossil Press"--hence the title of this anthology.  You can find his name by googling his press, and you can find anything you want about him by googling his name.

If you've done that, you've probably discovered that this"writer" and "editor" can't write or edit worth shit. He also likes to harass people. In this anthology, a lot of the people he harasses have gotten together to show that they can write better than him, put together a better anthology than he can, and sell more copies of their book than he's sold of all his books put together.

In doing so, they have put together a pretty good anthology. There are quite a few stories with thinly veiled versions of the troll in them.  My absolute favorite of those stories, and probably the anthology in general, was “Apartment B,” by Stinky Cat, which had me laughing out loud the whole time I was reading it. Jerrod Balzer's “Nat Poopcone vs. the Beast of Fossil Lake” was also very funny and weird. “What’s Your Beef?” by Mark Orr was also a good story of this type, though less of a humor story and more a tale of a gruesome demise.

Besides the stories with parodies of the troll, there are also quite a few regular works as well. There are two extracts from longer Ramsey Campbell works, which I now want to read. There is a cool weird fiction piece called “The Ziggurat of Skulls” by Joshua Dobson. There's a good fantasy story called “The Dank” by Doug Blakeslee. There are quite a few horror stores--too many to mention, really.

Overall, this is a good, diverse collection. It's well worth shelling out $2.99 to get this on your ereader.

The Miniature Wife

I was lucky enough to get a copy of The Miniature Wife and Other Stories by Manuel Gonzalez from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. With my love of bizarro fiction, I figured that a collection of more mainstream weird fiction would be right up my alley. I was right. It does have less gore and sex than a typical bizarro story collection, but I think bizarro fans might enjoy it, too.

This is a good bunch of stories, with some weird twists. The titular story, for instance, is about a man who works in miniaturization whose wife gets mysteriously miniaturized and starts a war against her husband. There are also stories about a hijacking that lasts for decades, a man who talks through his ears, and life in what seems to be a video game. Some of the stories also involve more traditional fantasy and horror creatures like zombies, werewolves, and unicorns.

There are a few minor things I didn't like about the stories. Too many of the stories take the form of mini-biographies or memoirs instead of the more usual types of fictional narrative, although since they are interesting biographies/memoirs, this isn't much of a complaint. However, some of them, most notably, "The Artist's Voice"--that's the one about the man who talks through his ears--do drag a little bit. Even so, this is a really nice bunch of stories

Shadow Show

I always find that I have a little trouble when writing reviews of anthologies. If I write about each story, the review ends up being way too long. If I only talk about the stories that stood out the most to me, then I feel like I've slighted the writers I don't mention. If I don't go into detail on any of the stories, then I feel like I'm not doing my job, even if it is a job that I'm not getting paid for. In the case of Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, I think I'm going to fall somewhere between option 2 and option 3.

I suppose I should start off by saying that this is a really great collection. Usually when I read an anthology, there's at least one story where I wonder what the editors where thinking when they included it. Not this time, though. I enjoyed all the stories in this anthology.

Ray Bradbury was a genius. He was one of the best writers of the 20th century. I think that this book isn't great just because it's a collection of great stories inspired by Bradbury. It's also great because it shows how much Bradbury influenced the great writers who came after him, (and Harlan Ellison® who was a contemporary). It's also great to see that while Bradbury is most often thought of a science fiction writer, this book also includes stories by fantasy, horror, and more mainstream writers.


This book is a fitting to one of our best writers. Anyone who is a fan of Ray Bradbury should give it a try. Anyone who isn't a fan of Ray Bradbury, should pick up some of his books and become a fan.

The Drunken Comic Book Monkeys in Sciencey Tales of Science Fiction

I've met the Drunken Comic Book Monkeys twice, and each time I did, I bought a book from them. They run a local small press, and show up at the local HorrorFind convention and at some of the events at the York Emporium. This time, since I was at the Emporium's Sci-Fi Saturday, I picked up the Monkey's Sciencey Tales of Science Fiction, which is a sequel to their previous book, Scary Tales of Scariness.

Since I've only met them twice, I have no idea if the Drunken Comic Book Monkies are as drunken, clueless, and obnoxious in real life as there counterparts are in the stories that make up this book, but I doubt it. The plots of all the stories revolve around how Brian Chris, the aforementioned Monkeys, keep getting in and out of  trouble while being as obnoxious, idiotic, and drunken as possible. This leads to a lot of funny stuff.

They meet clones. They get shrunk. They battle robots. They go to the Earth's core and to the moon. They meet an invisible fan. They travel to an alternate reality. They find a time machine. They take part in parodies of The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Island of Doctor Moreau. They drink a lot of beer and eat a lot of chicken wings.

These are a bunch of absurd science fiction stories. While I wouldn't rank it with the works of Douglas Adams, it's a good choice for fans of science fiction and humor.

21st Century Dead

When you're putting together a zombie anthology, there are really two choices you can make. The first option is to have the anthology be full of Romero-inspired flesh eaters, which pleases the hard-core zombie fans, but can make for a boring and repetitive anthology. The other option is to include stories with zombie-like undead creatures , which generally annoys the hard-core zombie fans, but usually makes for a better anthology.

21st Century Dead: A Zombie Anthology, edited by Christopher Golden, goes for the second option, which I think was the right choice. There are about three (or maybe four) stories in the anthology that I wouldn't classify as having actual zombies in them. The rest do have zombies in them, though they aren't all flesh eaters and they aren't always central to the story. I generally enjoyed the stories in the collection. To break things down, there was one story I hated, one story I loved, one story I kind of disliked, and sixteen stories that I liked to one degree or another.

The story I hated was "The Dead of Dromore," by Ken Bruen. I actively disliked the characters in this one, who are a band of mercenaries paid to go into a zombie-infested town to rescue a survivor, and who would rather murder all of the other survivors than rescue them for free. Disliking the characters isn't usually enough to get me to dislike the story itself, but the style was. It has way to many sentence fragments and  short sentences for my taste. Plus there's a lot of weird formatting where single sentences are broken up to be spread across several paragraphs, looking something like this:

Helped there by a combination of

The CIA

Mossad

And the Chinese

Spreading a single sentence over four paragraphs is just annoying. If I thought it was just a product of my copy being an ARC, I could overlook it, but I suspect that it is intentional.

The story I loved was "Ghost Dog & Pup," by Thomas E Sniegoski, which was one of the less zombie-centric stories. There are zombies in it, but they don't really show up until nearly the end and aren't the focus. At its heart, I would call this one a boy and his dog/ghost story.  I suspect the reason I enjoyed it so much is because, being a dog lover,  I've always been a sucker for boy and his dog stories.

The story I kind of disliked was "Tic Boom, A Love Story," by Kurt Sutter. In this case, the story was interesting, but as with the story I hated, the  style annoyed me. Kurt Sutter is the creator of Sons of Anarchy, and this is his first piece of published prose. As such, it isn't surprising that his story reads more like a screenplay than a short story. It doesn't make the story bad, but it did distract me a bit too much.

Since this review is getting a bit long, I'll just briefly go over the other stories that stood out to me. I really enjoyed Brian Keene's "Couch Potato" and Jonathan Maberry's "Jack And Jill," which isn't surprising as those are two writers I really enjoy. Despite finding his politics abhorrent, and his tale not being an actual zombie story, Orson Scott Card's ""Carousel" was a good story. Chelsea Cain's "Why Mothers Let Their Babies Watch Television" was pretty funny. "Tender As Teeth," by Stephanie Crawford and Diane Swierczynski, was interesting because it was about a person who'd been cured of zombieism.

Despite having a couple of stories I didn't like, this was a good anthology that I recommend for the zombie lover.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 30: Slag Attack

I've made it to day thirty of bizarro fiction month. It's time to review my final Andersen Prunty book for the month: Slag Attack. This is a collection of four linked short stories. They're all set in a world where the Earth has been taken over by these nasty, man-eating slug/maggot creatures called slags.

The first story is "The Devastated Insides of Hollow City." It's about a bounty hunter named Shell who has come to Hollow City to find the city's Queen Pearl, who has disappeared. His search for her takes him to some strange and gruesome places.

Next is "Vincent Severity," which is really more of a horror story than anything. It's set several months before the first story, and begins just as the first slag attacks start. It's about a woman named Amber who is kidnapped by a lunatic named Vincent.

Story three is "Corpse Mountain," and also probably my favorite. It's about a guy who lives in a junkyard and his two stupid minions. They're trying to build robots to help fight off the slags.

The final story is "All Alone at the Edge of the World." It's about a guy named Darren, who is living alone in a house by the sea in the last days of the slag attacks. The slags have grown humongous. Soon, Darren encounters Shell and Pearl from the first story, who are leading a small resistance group. Of course, things are not quite what they seem.

Great collection.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 20: A Million Versions of Right

This is April 20th, which means it's also day 20 of Bizarro Fiction Month here on the blog.  Today I'm going to review Matthew Revert's A Million Versions of Right, which is one of the best collections of bizarro short fiction that I've read.  There are only six stories in it, but most of them are fairly long, and all of them were enjoyable.

The book opens with the titular "A Million Versions of Right." This is the story of a young man who discovers that when he ejaculates, he will occasionally release a miniature tiler instead of the expected sperm. The first time this happens he ends up having most of his body covered in tile before being rescued by his father. The whole experience tends to warp his sex life very badly.

The next story is "The Bricolage Scrotum," which is about scrotums. A school principal has hired two local boys to pulp his scrotum in front of his students because he hates scrotums. The boys manage to destroy their own scrotums while practicing. Also there's a scrotum advocacy group that wants to stop the exhibition.

Then We have "The Great Headphone Wank," which is about a man who has a job insulting walls. He is given a pair of headphones that only produce the sounds of masturbation. Weirdness ensues.

"Meeting Max" was the next story, and was one that I though was a bit slow paced, but I still enjoyed it a lot. It's about a guy who lives in the barber district and is obsessed with barbers. A bald guy is going around knocking over comb jars and smashing windows, and our hero tries to track him down Then lots of even weirder stuff happens.

Then come "Power Blink," which is mostly about band-aids.

The final story is "The Bookmark That Wouldn't Work," which is the fictional history of bookmarks, and the story of one woman with reading problems who gets a bookmark that won't work.

I like this collection a lot, and highly recommend it.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 17: Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy

I'm finally up to day 17 of Bizarro fiction month, and today I turn to a book by Bradley Sands for review.

I love bizarro. I love short story collections. Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy is a short story collection. Does that mean I loved Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy? Obviously Don't love it just because it's a bizarro short story collection.

Technically speaking, a lot of what's in here isn't really short stories. Much of it is too short for that. It's the sort of stuff that people generally consider flash fiction, though Sands himself calls it prose poetry. Whatever you want to call it, it's good stuff.

My favorite was probably the first, "Seth Shultz," which seems to be the story that inspired the title. It's about a man in a bear costume who attends an orgy. "Scenes From The Life Of A Greeting Card Designer" was another one I really enjoyed.

This was cool. Also, while I normally think that it's tacky for an author to chastise people for giving their book a bad review, the response to this negative Amazon Review is hilarious.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 16: The Overwhelming Urge

It's now Day 16 of Bizarro Fiction Month. I've passed the halfway mark, and have decided that much of this week will be dedicated to a type of book I find hard to review: short story collections.

The Overwhelming Urge, by Andersen Prunty,  is  a collection of flash fiction, except for "Discovering the Shape of My Skull," which seems to be long enough to count as a short story. Anyway, writing a review of a flash fiction collection is hard for me, because I don't really know what to say about it.

I could just say that I like this book, but that's not much of a review. Most of the stories are so short that any discussion of what I liked about them would probably be longer than the story I was reviewing. The best I can say is that these stories are all really short, and range from kind of strange to really f-ing weird.

I did enjoy this, and if you aren't the sort of person to be bothered by the fact that this review is longer than many of the stories in the collection, I think you should give this a chance.

Cripple Wolf

Cripple Wolf by Jeff Burk is a collection of bizarro short stories. It's a darn good collection too. I think it's probably the best collection of bizarro stories I've read, which isn't actually saying much, since this is only the third one I've read. Still, I really did like it.

The titular story is about a wheelchair-bound werewolf who slaughters a plane full of fetishists. There's a Christmas story about a junkie version of Frosty the Snowman. There's a story about reality show featuring cannibal chefs. There are cats, space badgers, elderly punk rockers, and a park.

I really loved the werewolf story and the chef story. The rest of the stories were mostly pretty good too. However, the story with the park, "Just Another Day in the Park," was probably my least favorite in the book, as it seemed to be a lacking something.

I think this book is well worth the time of anyone who likes weird  stories and isn't bothered by gore.

Houdini Gut Punch: An Anthology of Bizarro Horror ed. by Jonathan Moon

Houdini Gut Punch is an anthology of bizarro short stories.If you don't know what bizarro, is you should probably click on the link, which goes to the Wikipedia entry for bizarro fiction. If you want a quick summary, it is really f'ed up, bizarre stuff.

This book features stories with lots of f'ed up, bizarre subjects:a man who keeps his soul inside a duck, a woman who adopts an insect angel the crawls out of her drain,the eternal conflict between a moth and some kind of monster thing, a guy whose head starts absorbing animals causing him to give birth to monster things, etc.

Not all of the stories were winners, though. A couple were kind of boring. One kept switching between the first, second, and third person viewpoints and changed which character had which viewpoint, which was confusing, but sort of made sense at the end. Some of the stories mad no sense, but were usually still enjoyable. If you like the weird like I do, then you will probably enjoy this book.

Classics Mutilated ed. by Jeff Conner

Classics Mutilated is a collection of short fiction in the genre of what is apparently called Monster Lit, which is when authors take classic works and add in zombies or whatnot or famous historical people and put them in some kind of supernatural situation. At least according to the introduction anyway; I've been avoiding that stuff.

Technically speaking only one of the stories in the collection is the "take a classic and add stuff to make it weird" type. That's Rick Hautala's "Little Women in Black," which combines a scene from Little Women with some men in black type action. Basically, I found that story to be weird and confusing, though still entertaining.

The rest of the stories are more or less evenly divided between weird tales featuring historical personages and weird literary (or other media) mashups. Overall, I preferred the mashups. The historical ones weren't bad, but mostly featured people I don't particularly care about.

"Fairest of Them All" by Sean Taylor is a very strange mashup of Snow White and Alice in Wonderland.  This story was just cool.

"Anne-droid of Green Gables" by Lezli Robyn is a steam punk version of Anne of Green Gables. It's a very heart-warming story.

"Death stopped for Miss Dickinson" by Kristine Katherine Rusch tells the story of Emily Dickinson's love affair with Death. It was interesting,but as I'm not particularly a fan of poetry, I wasn't as entranced as I was with some of the stories.

"Twilight of the Gods" by Chris Ryall is the story of Loki told in the style of Twilight. This was funny.

"Pokky Man" by Marc Laidlaw is basically a non copyright infringing Pokemon story told in the style of a documentary film. Definately my least favorite of the mashups, but still not a bad story.

"Vicious" by Mark Morris is the tale of how Sid Vicious got put under a Voodoo curse. I'm not really that much of a fan of punk or 70s rock in general,  but I actually liked this story and felt kind of bad for Sid.

"From Hell's Heart" by Nancy Collins is the story of what happened to Ahab after he died in Moby Dick. This was a cool story with one of my favorite monsters in it.

"Frankenbilly" by John Shirley is a story about Billy the Kid meeting up with Victor Frankenstein. As you might guess, it was inspired by Billy the Kid Versus Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter., which means it's cool (at least if your like me).

"The Green Menace" by Thomas Tessier is about Joe McCarthy fighting killer frogs. The only downside to this story is that since MCarthy is a real person, you know the frogs aren't going to kill the bastard even though you wish they would.

"Quoth the Rock Star" by Rio Youers is about Jim Morrison meeting the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe. The Doors aren't really my kind of music any more than The Sex Pistols are, but I still enjoyed this one.

"The Happiest Hell on Earth" by John Skipp & Cody Goodfellow is the tale of what would have happened if the animal people from The Island of Dr. Moreau had gone on to work for a company that is very much like Disney, but not called that since no one wants to get sued. This was a very cool story.

"Dread Island" by Joe Lansdale is Huck Finn meets Uncle Remus meets Cthulu. I think it's the best story in the book.

The Zombist: Undead Western Tales ed. by William R. Tucker

The Zombist: Undead Western Tales is, as the title suggests, a short story collection full of zombie westerns. On the plus side, it does have a reasonably diverse collection of zombie types: old fashioned voodoo , Romero-style, modern fast, and quite a few supernatural.  The supernaturals seem to dominate as a large portion of the stories involve Indian curses.

I would rate the quality of the stories as mostly good. I wouldn't call any of them super great stories that should have been nominated for a Stoker Award , but they are generally we written and entertaining. A few of the longer stories tended to drag a bit, especially near the end of the book. The only story that I absolutely hated was John P. Wilson's "A Wonderful Man," because about halfway through the story,  the protagonist goes from being a wonderful man to being a murdering psychopath for no apparent reason. This is very poor character development.

There are two other downsides to this book. The first, as seems to be increasingly common in small press trade paperbacks, is that the books seems to have had a distinct lack of copy editing. The second is that, as could probably be expected in an anthology with such a narrow focus, the stories start to seem a little repetitive after a while.

Even so, this book is still good, zombie fun for those of us who like the genre.

Stories edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio

Stories: All-New Tales is very nearly the perfect short story collection. It's a very eclectic collection; there are fantasy stories, horror stories, science fiction stories, and general fiction. As Gaiman says in his introduction, the editors wanted to put together stories that are designed to make the reader ask. "...and then what happened?" Almost all of the stories do this and do it well.

Notice that I said almost. There are two exception to this. Chuck Palahniuk's "story," "Loser," quite frankly sucks. I would barely even qualify it as a story. It's about a frat boy on acid who goes on a game show that seems to be The Price Is Right as written by someone who's never actually seen the show.  There is pretty much no action at all, and nothing of any interest whatsoever happens. Also, it's written in the second person present tense, which is really annoying.

The other exception is Michael Moorcock's "Stories," which is at least a story, just a boring one. This is rather surprising coming from the man behind the Eternal Champion series, since I know he can write a good story (I've never actually read anything by Palahniuk). This is a long rambling story about the life of an editor and his slightly nutso writer friend written as a sort of reminiscence. It's not really very interesting.

The rest of the stories range from great to pretty darn good. Gaiman's "The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains" is excellent, as you would expect from a writer of Gaiman's caliber. Walter Mosley's "Juvenal Nyx" has great potential as a series character. Joe Hill's "The Devil on the Staircase" is written in a format similar to concrete poetry, but is a very good tale. Al Sarrantonio's "Cult of the Nose" is a great weird story.  Really all of the other stories are good. Most of them could very well have been the stand out story in any other anthology. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this being nominated for--and probably winning--several awards.