Gaslight Gothic: Strange Tales of Sherlock Holmes, edited by J.R. Campbell and Charles Prepolec. EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, 2018
This is a compilation of newly written Sherlock tales, which, as the title indicates, hae a gothic slant. And not just gothic, but supernatural gothic. In the various stories we have Elder Gods, Edger ( Read more... )

Asking For Love, by Roxana Robinson. Random House, 1996 Robinson writes of love in the lives of upper class, east coast, WASPs. In these stories she writes of marriage, divorce, remarriage, and how the children are affected. Her prose is lucid and unornamented; the stories are told with no unnecessary words. Not being of the group of people she ( Read more... )

The Whispered Tales of Graves Grove, edited by J.S. Bailey & Kelsey Keating. BHC Press, 2017
This is a collection of short horror stories, but it is a sort of concept album: The editors created the town of Graves Grove, gave it a short backstory, and then said Go! Every story is set there, there are some repeating characters, and an assortment of ( Read more... )

Shaken and Stirred: Intoxicating Stories. Everyman’s Pocket Classics. Borzoi Books, 2016 Part of the ‘Everyman’s Pocket Classics’ series of themed volumes, ‘Shaken and Stirred’ is a collection of stories about drinking. The volume features authors of the last two centuries, and includes Dickens, Twain, P.G. Wodehouse (my favorite in the book), F. ( Read more... )

She, by Michelle Latiolais. W.W. Norton & Co., 2015 ‘She’ is an odd little book, neither novel nor short stories. Nameless women populate the chapters-stories? - with one girl, a fifteen year old runaway from a strict, abusive, fundamentalist family wandering in and out throughout the book. She has no idea what Los Angeles is like, but manages to ( Read more... )

Tales of Terror and Mystery, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. First Rate Publishers, 2016 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a prolific writer, and his Sherlock Holmes stories, while the best known of his work, were only a fraction of what he wrote. This book gives us six tales of terror- mostly supernatural- and seven tales of mystery- all works of humankind ( Read more... )

Trigger Warning, by Neil Gaiman. William Morrow 2015
“Trigger Warning” is a collection Neil Gailman’s short fiction. Pretty much all of it has been published elsewhere; the only exception, I believe, is “Black Dog”, the last story in the collection. It’s set in the world of “American Gods” and is an adventure one of the characters has after that ( Read more... )

A Simplified Map of the Real World: the Renata Stories, by Stevan Allred. Forest Avenue Press, 2013 Renata is the small town at the center of a county in central Oregon. The fifteen stories set there span several generations; characters show up in more than one story; sometimes we see a story from various perspective. There is a continuity that ( Read more... )

The Mammoth Book of Steampunk: 30 Extraordinary Tales, edited by Sean Wallace. Running Press, 2012 I find myself torn, as I so frequently am with anthologies, between great enthusiasm and complete boredom concerning this book. Some of the stories I found excellent; some were little more than scenes or prose poems. Most are not what I’ve come to ( Read more... )

A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me, by David Gates. Alfred A. Knopf, 2015
These are not happy little stories. Not that stories need to be happy, of course, but these are depressing in the “this is how life is” kind of way. These are upper class people, for the most part- academics, artists, writers, architects- all people who are well educated. These ( Read more... )