I got this book at ABC Books in June at the author’s book signing.
When I bought the book, the author described the short stories as O. Henry mixed with The Twilight Zone. As you might recollect, gentle reader, I read The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia in 2018 and have since accumulated a number of DVDs with episodes on them (and I’ve watched a few). I’ve always found its speculative fiction inspirational in giving me ideas for my own writing, so I looked forward to this book. I bought the author’s first two books of short fiction, and she said she had enough ideas mapped out for another eight or nine books in a similar vein.
The book collects 42 stories in roughly 420 pages, so about ten pages per, more or less. Genres include fantasy, horror, and science fiction along with some that are more speculative than genre-specific. They’re pretty well-written and well-executed for the most part, with interesting characters built with good prose. But….
The O. Henry part rears its head in that most of the stories are structured with that well-crafted beginning of the story that ends on the twist ending in the last sentence, paragraph, or couple of paragraphs. Characters and their situations are built up and then DUN DUN DUN! The demons are loosed upon the world. Or DUN DUN DUN! They were the aliens visiting Earth. Or DUN DUN DUN! The aliens sucked their brains out through their noses!
So it’s a book best taken in sips and not one to read all the way through all at once, as that will highlight how the stories have very similar structures and DUN DUN DUNs. As I said, well-written but formulaic in its own way, and many of the stories could use a little more denouement and maybe not have all of the sympathetic heroes and heroines getting killed by shapeshifting alien serial killers. Once in a while, it would be nice if the plucky small town girl would maybe at least survive.
