“The Secretary of Defense stood at the front of the room giving the most important PowerPoint presentation in human history. […] The fate of all mankind rested on the decisions that would be made in this room in the next few minutes, so of course PowerPoint wasn’t working. […] ‘It doesn’t really matter which dimension you’re in Mr. President, Windows still does that. There’s even one Earth where Bill Gates’s cyborg head is God Emperor and they’re still forced to use Vista.’ ” In a […]
I want to say I excpect more from Gaiman, except when it comes to his short stories I don’t really.
Trigger Warnings is a collection of short stories by Neil Gaiman, I believe his third collection. It’s a pretty meh collection, practically all of the stories were forgotten the moment I turned the page. I find this to be true of most of his short stories if I’m honest, I like (and occasionally love) his novels, but his short stories generally leave me cold. That this collection is so bland is rather ironic considering the tittle. Before I get into the actual stories, I do […]
The night is dark and full of terrors
I found this through Scalzi’s big idea series and immediately put it in my library request list. The list of contributing authors is heavily weighted to my recent favourites, not to mention that I always love dark reinterpretations of fairy tales. This was an awesome collection, starting strong and ending great (and the physical book is gorgeous with lovely internal illustrations, I’ll be buying my own copy). There was a good representation of countries as well as a nice mix of modern retellings with more […]
Wicked Tales
The cover of this book has a quote from a review in Independent that sums up these nine short stories better than I ever could: “If this collection can be said to have a clear uniting theme, it might be that by a certain stage of life we’ve all got at least one person we would really like to kill”. That’s…pretty much perfect. “What is a stromatolite? he asks rhetorically, his eyes gleaming. The word comes from the Greek stroma, a mattress, coupled with the root word […]
Probably more like 3.5 stars, but I’ll round up in Bernie’s honor
I’ve been reading and rereading Lawrence Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr series for years (like, probably close to 20 years — they were on the shelf above Lillian Jackson Braun’s books at my library and I picked them up at some point in middle school when I’d exhausted The Cat Who…) but I’ve never really read anything else by him — although he’s published quite a bit. I saw his name on this story collection, along with some other favorites (Stephen King, Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child, and Craig Ferguson, […]
Don’t Let the Cover Fool You
Phantaxis, James Edward O’Brien, editor (2016) These short stories of fantasy and science fiction reach across a broad and enjoyable spectrum. From a police detective in Victorian England looking for a supernatural murderer for to a bodiless head trying to survive in the far future, there’s something in here for everyone. Frostfire – In Victorian England, a gifted police detective enlists the aid of a young washerwoman witch to stop a chain of supernatural murders. Lengthy but strangely contemporary. Countdown to Extinction – Three scientists […]