Katherine
I picked this collection of short stories up on a whim when at a local bookstore in Michigan- I saw it on a shelf of local authors and thought, why not? Well, I can say I definitely enjoyed it more than I expected. The entire collection has a framing story, where the narrator of the first story catches lightning and that gives him this amazing burst of inspiration. He wrote down hundreds of stories, and these are some of them.
While some of them I didn’t really understand or get (unfortunately, some I found confusing because of the way it was told or too short to make its point), the majority were enjoyable. The prose is simple, but works well. There were a few typos here and there, but given this is a self-published book I was impressed with the overall quality.
This collection has everything from dragon-based technology that replaced regular electronics, to horror-adjacent stories about small Midwestern towns, to brief retellings of different folklore (Hawaiian and Native American), to a new person taking up the mantle of Death, to the planet Saturn consuming the solar system. The ideas were generally SO creative, and the tone of each story varied wildly. I enjoyed the drier sense of humor and the many references made in some of the stories (I caught potentially a Joe Abercrombie reference, Star Trek, Star Wars, Dragonlance, and more).
If you want a relatively short read with some interesting stories, I’d recommend picking this up somewhere. I’d love to read some of this author’s longer works! I liked the longer stories more overall, and I’d love to see some of this creativity fleshed out into a novella or novel.
I picked this collection of short stories up on a whim when at a local bookstore in Michigan- I saw it on a shelf of local authors and thought, why not? Well, I can say I definitely enjoyed it more than I expected. The entire collection has a framing story, where the narrator of the first story catches lightning and that gives him this amazing burst of inspiration. He wrote down hundreds of stories, and these are some of them.
While some of them I didn’t really understand or get (unfortunately, some I found confusing because of the way it was told or too short to make its point), the majority were enjoyable. The prose is simple, but works well. There were a few typos here and there, but given this is a self-published book I was impressed with the overall quality.
This collection has everything from dragon-based technology that replaced regular electronics, to horror-adjacent stories about small Midwestern towns, to brief retellings of different folklore (Hawaiian and Native American), to a new person taking up the mantle of Death, to the planet Saturn consuming the solar system. The ideas were generally SO creative, and the tone of each story varied wildly. I enjoyed the drier sense of humor and the many references made in some of the stories (I caught potentially a Joe Abercrombie reference, Star Trek, Star Wars, Dragonlance, and more).
If you want a relatively short read with some interesting stories, I’d recommend picking this up somewhere. I’d love to read some of this author’s longer works! I liked the longer stories more overall, and I’d love to see some of this creativity fleshed out into a novella or novel.
