I ordered two copies by mistake for the library. I bought this second copy and only now got to reading it. 24 stories by as many authors. There is a forward by John Connolly. Did I read the forward? Of course not.
Short story collection by the usual mid-list people I follow or run across online. The stories usually have a theme or aspect of sex or sexuality. Maybe if I read the foreword I would find out the factors for selection. Will I now read the forward? Of course not.
Comments:
1. My favorites: Scott Phillips, Victor Gischler, Patrick Shawn Bagley, Nick Stone, Talia Berliner.
2. Berliner's story was absolutely repulsive. A story about a murderer with a fetish for taxidermying his victims or their select body parts. Murder is bad enough but the killer deserved to be drowned in manure; which, interestingly, appears in a different author's tale.
3. I stopped reading Stephen Blackmoore's blog when I scaled back. His story was decent. Young idiots in a rock band.
4. Scott Phillips and Victor Gischler always continue to produce high quality stuff.
5. I've discovered that I tend to quickly burn out on short stories. I prefer to have a longer story to follow when reading a whole book.
6. I t read J.D. Rhoades newspaper columns much more than his fiction. (Many commenters on his columns classify that as fiction, too.) His story about a gambling addict was good. Addict stories interest me. I'm not sure why. I've written before that all I know about AA I learned from Matt Scudder. I learned to appreciate the taste of Tullamore Dew through a friend of Matt Scudder.
7. Blake Crouch's tale of white yuppie's suspecting a relative of murder was well done. In real life I could most easily relate to that kind of character but still prefer the down and out types in fiction.
8. Christa Faust has a story about models who do foot fetish work.
9. Nick Stone's story about a shlubby PI being conned for an unknown reason really deserves a novel length version.
10. JA Konrath crammed as many jokes as he could into his story. I was annoyed. I assume the main character appears as a secondary characters in his Daniels series.
11. Maxim Jakubowski was good. An older man and his young lover in Spain. I read a Jakubowski novel, It's You That I Want to Kiss, when it came out in '99. I don't remember anything about it.
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