It's hard to believe that this is already EFTBB's third Best-of list, but here it is, nonetheless. (You can check out the lists from 2012 and 2013 if you don't believe it, either!) These are, as always, the books that struck a chord in me, moved me, inspired me, and turned me on. These are the books that, when I think back over the past year, have stayed with me; the books I still think about, wonder about, dream about, and love. I hope you will love them, too. Enjoy!
TAS
THE BEST OF 2014
Rod Kierkegard: Adultery: The Scarlet Alphabet
Donna
George Storey: Picture Perfect
Janine
Ashbless: Fierce Enchantments
Elizabeth
Schechter: House of Sable Locks
Madeleine
Shade: Porked and Rumpled
Elizabeta
Brooke: Darkly Delicious Short Stories
D.L.
King: Her Wish is Your Command
Gabrielle
Harbowy, ed.: Jacked In: Transhumanist
Erotica
Kathleen
Tudor, ed.: Like a Trip Through the
Mirror: Lesbian Love in Alternate Realities
Jeremy
Edwards: Spark My Moment
Janine
Ashbless: Cover Him with Darkness
M.
Christian: Love Without Gun Control
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An
easy choice for best of the year, Rod Kierkegard’s Adultery: The Scarlet Alphabet is a comic gem, a cerebral
masterpiece of contemporary social satire slumming as breezy sex farce, with a
bit of trenchant literary criticism thrown in for good measure. The author’s
razor-like wit is stropped with just the right amount of cynicism, which he
employs not so much to lay bare the paradox and folly of modern life as to
gleefully vivisect the whole animal, pulling back layers of pretense and
self-deception like tissue to reveal the fragile, frightened egoist’s heart
beneath—all the while managing to be funny as hell for more than 300 pages.
Orlando
Plummer is a tenuously tenured professor of Traditional English Literature at
upper-Manhattan’s ultra-PC Lumumba University (three guesses as to what that
reference oh-so thinly veils). A self-described academic “performance artist”
with the veneer of an Oxbridge pedigree and not a single creative or ambitious
cell in his body, Orlando is, as he himself puts it, a man without a heart,
incapable of feeling guilt, only fear. And there is much to be afraid of in
this labyrinth of Orwellian academic bureaucracy where PC culture has run not
merely amok, but deep into the province of the surreal; where New Age
psychobabble and deconstructionist gobbledygook have assumed the solemnity of
cultic scripture, and where a career-ending sexual harassment complaint is only
a direct look in the eye away.
Accordingly,
in response to Orlando’s obsessive philandering, the wife he loathes but cannot
leave arranges a series of “couples dates” with the wealthy Roger and Arabia
Fliederman. Ultimately, of course, wackiness and extremely expensive
polyamorous group-therapy ensues. Love triangles, meanges à quatre, impromptu quintets, poly-quads, and
dysfunctionally sexless sextets form and disintegrate with the manic
promiscuity of some microscopic multi-celled community, the narrative
convolutions a gaudily variegated mosaic of multi-cultural intercourse.
References
to Japanese No and Kabuki Theater are a sort of recurring literary symbol in
the novel, a principle of continuity that effectively holds the structure up
despite its sprawling eclecticism. Other marvelously arcane references abound,
everything from the Tale of Genji to
the Orlandos of Ariosto and Virginia
Wolf, the novels of Thackeray and the short stories of Irwin Shaw. Recommended
with several extra soupçon of pure gusto. Run, don’t walk to get your hands on
a copy of this one!
Picture Perfect: The Best of DonnaGeorge Storey (The Mammoth Book of Erotica)
Donna
George Storey clearly understands that the quickest way to an intelligent
reader’s turn-on is through his or her brain—as these six superbly-crafted
short stories so amply demonstrate. All of them are impressively understated,
yet powerfully, ineluctably sexy. Storey’s approach may strike some as oddly
low-key, perhaps a tad too cerebral and slow-paced for the average smut-slut,
the heat-factor a bit on the lukewarm side for the more voraciously
undiscriminating members of the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am crowd. Yet, this
author clearly knows her audience, richly rewarding those willing to stay with
her. Seldom falling back too heavily on paraphilic gimmickry or kink for the
sake of mere shock value, never descending into gratuitous raunch or vulgarity,
the aphrodisiacal potency of the writing is nonetheless undeniable. If this is
“vanilla” it is the sweetest, most potent vanilla one could ever hope to
taste—the kind a body could get happily drunk on, and never regret the
hangover.
This
is marvelous writing by the standards of any genre, and there is a good deal to
be enjoyed here, from the pruriently playful title story to Spring Pictures, a return to the world
of Amorous Woman, Storey’s
outstanding novel of life in Japan, with all its deeply inscrutable erotic
mystery and breathtaking wonder, to the odd sensual magic of Being Bobby, a diverting tale of
imagination and physical empathy, to the outstanding To Dance at the Fair, a multi-part short story with the complexity
and impact of a full-length novel, remarkable for its wealth of erudition,
insight, and depth of feeling.
These
ten deliciously diverse stories reveal a vivid, wide-ranging imagination—one is
struck by the sheer breadth of Ashbless’ inventiveness, her natural gift for
story-telling honed to acute sharpness with rigorous intellectual focus and
well-practiced craftswomanship. Covering all the archetypal bases from folk
ballads, myth, legend, and fairytale to futuristic sci-fi, well-researched
historical fiction, contemporary horror, paranormal thriller, and
post-apocalyptic action-adventure, there’s something for everyone in this
wondrously abundant, cerebrally and erotically stimulating, perpetually
entertaining collection.
Personal
favorites include The King in the Wood, a
marvelous glimpse into the life of ancient Rome, where the erotic and the
sacred were often one in the same; Sycorax,
a delectably sexy re-imagining of The
Tempest, re-casting sweet Miranda as a rather adventurous wild-child; At Usher’s Well, based on an old folk
ballad (familiar to many from the version recorded by the folk-rock group
Steeleye Span in the 1970s) in which the tale of three-doomed brothers’
homecoming is related from the point of view of the serving girl who loved them
all in life; and A Man’s Best Friend,
the story of a wandering bard, seeking out the young widow of his fallen
comrade, a gorgeously detailed story, told with such familiar ease and poignant
beauty that it seems to come alive within and all around us.
Ashbless’
tales are full of lively spins and twists that almost always surprise, yet
never fail in retrospect to seem exactly right, as with Bolt Hole her steamy, claustrophobic take on the zombie apocalypse;
or the portrayal of BDSM-as-PTSD-therapy for emotionally scarred vampire
hunters in The Last Thing She Needs,
or the pleasingly Heinlein-esque The
Military Mind, in which a squad of futuristic Marines bonds with the aid of
a sexy telepath. Turnabout is more than fair play (or foreplay) in Knight Takes Queen, in which the
familiar legend of Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot is transformed into something
that neither Mallory, T.H. White, or Lerner and Lowe would ever have thought
of, a twist so ineluctably sexily perfect that readers will be nodding their
heads even as they sit gape-mouthed, trying to get their minds around what they
have just imagined.
Elizabeth
Schechter fuses diverse genres with such artful subtlety that we barely notice
the genius at work before our eyes. Steampunk, erotica, fairytale romance,
horror, sci-fi; Schechter does it all so deftly, blends it all so seamlessly,
we are left wondering by what weird and wonderful magic such stories are
created. Her latest novel Hose of Sable
Locks is based on The Succubus,
one of the most memorable short stories in the D.L. King-edited steampunk erotica anthology Carnal Machines. The
original short story, related entirely from the melancholy perspective of a
dominatrix-automaton in an exclusive London brothel, becomes the first chapter
of the novel, virtually without alteration. But now, Schechter has expanded her
somewhat narrowly defined steampunk/BDSM story-verse as well as her narrative
point-of-view into the realms of alternate world history, gothic horror,
mystery, and romance. We learn The Succubus’ fascinating and disturbing
backstory along with that of William, the young man she comes to love and long
for as no other. An artificer or mechanical scientist, William just on the cusp
of majority, is a virtual prisoner in his own home, under the sway of his
grasping uncle, his life, present and past, not wholly his own.
The
brothel itself, a sort of Victorian BDSM Disneyland, complete with automated
pirates in one of its many sexy theme rooms, becomes a character in the story;
the too-long neglected machinery in its dusty attics and crawl spaces akin to a
beating heart, keeping everything in operation, yet vulnerable and dangerous.
William is drawn to the house as much by his scientific curiosity as by his
need for physical release and psychological clarity. The very-human soul of The
Succubus longs to help the young man overcome the demons of his past.
Schechter
is not only an engaging storyteller, but a serious, intelligent and perceptive
observer of the human condition. Among other things, I was refreshed and
delighted by the author’s sensitive, beautifully naturalistic treatment of
William’s bisexuality; the luminous descriptions of the polyamorous m/f/m
relationship he enjoys as a student, and the romantic white-knight chivalry in
his endeavors to rescue The Succubus and be united with his love. Amazing!
Fantastic! Glorious! All this and more. I couldn’t wait to read the next
chapter as each day drew to a close, and I suspect that readers with more
unregimented time on their hands may gobble it up in a single sitting.
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These
gripping, intensely erotic retellings of familiar fairytales are vividly
conceived, expertly executed, and make for some of the most thoroughly
entertaining light reading published in recent memory. Madeleine Shade brings
impressive erudition and deep psychological insight to her seductively
ingenious craft, all the while remaining accessibly down-to-earth and
mind-blowingly steamy—in itself, a feat akin to magic! Shade thoroughly mines
each tale for its unique pscyho-erotic potential, further refining them with a
frank contemporary sensibility. These are not the bowdlerized bedtime stories
of Andrew Lang or Joseph Jacobs; here, the princesses and fae folk are all
grown up and seething with grownup passions, portrayed with near-palpable
intensity.
Porked,
Shade’s twist on The Three Little Pigs
amuses on many levels. Beyond its deliciously compelling storyline, readers
will find is a puissant exploration of issues of self-perception, body image,
and sexual ethics. A much simpler tale, but in its way no less fascinating, Rumpled offers readers a rare and
tantalizing glimpse into the world of erotic lactation, still one of the most
obscure, taboo-shrouded subgenre niches in all erotic writing, here illuminated
with surprising taste and sensitivity.
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Shade
has expertly turned these once-simple stories into something resembling the
cornerstone of a vast novelistic edifice; a new and exciting erotic-fantasy
“verse”, familiar, yet uniquely her own, in which characters from each story
end up crossing paths with the familiar ease of the dramatis personae in a
Dickens’ novel.
Elizabeta
Brooke is that rare creator of erotic fiction that is at once beautifully
written, sharply perceptive, and probingly intelligent, but also thoroughly
entertaining. She occupies her character’s heads with such seeming ease and
naturalistic empathy that readers cannot help but be drawn in. Brooke’s work is
always sensually charged, with rich, vibrantly erogenous atmosphere, never
failing to touch us on an acutely visceral level. And yet, she does not shy
away from psychological conflict or moral complexity—all-too rare in literature
nowadays, and virtually unheard of in erotica. More than anything else, this is
what makes Brooke’s work extraordinary, and, ultimately, destined to last.
It
is thus something of an occasion to celebrate the appearance of this new
collection of five short stories. Representing Brooke’s entire output in the
form to date (including her Best-of-2012-cited masterpiece Poe), Darkly Delicious
Short Stories offers readers the rarest of gifts; sexy tales that they will
actually want to read more than once.
The
new stories in this collection reveal the author’s movement in a somewhat more
accessibly mainstream direction. Stella:
An Erotic Kidnapping is a diverting, if fairly lightweight action/adventure
piece with flashes of comic irony and a satisfying last-second twist; a heist
caper infused with nostalgic “what-if-ing” and a bit of marvelously steamy
present-moment “why-not-ing” as well.
The
general plot description of Knock makes
the story sound mundane, almost like a softcore vignette, far more ordinary
than it truly is. Susan, a thirtysomething housewife, reduced to selling
cosmetics door-to-door, rings her best friend’s
bell, only to be met at the front door by the friend’s handsome
eighteen-year-old son in nothing but a towel . . . and you can probably guess
where things go from there. Except that Brooke has a few interesting new twists
and turnabouts with which to surprise her readers.
The
superbly affecting Roj begins with
the promise of a psycho-erotic masterpiece, skillfully building tension in a
simple narrative structure, though, in the end, the characters may dwell too
heavily on process—but oh! What a journey it is!
Wryly
satirical on one level, funny, poignant and perceptive, Prissy: An Erotic Act of Kindness offers an irresistibly sardonic take
on adolescent voyeurism, and the bewildering nature of “old sex” as seen
through the eyes of relative inexperience. With its realistic and sensitive
portrayal of adolescent emotion in the context of satiric fantasy, this is
certainly one of the most enjoyable stories of the year.
While
the four newer stories in this collection do endeavor to reach a broader
audience, their genre aspirations do not detract from their decided literary
quality and substance. Though one may complain from time to time about the
excesses of genre erotica, ultimately, the only unredeemable sin in literature is
bad writing, a crime of which no one will ever honestly accuse Elizabeta
Brooke. This truly delicious collection is highly recommended.
D.L.
King is probably best known as the editor of several award-winning erotica
anthologies, but is also a superb erotic raconteur in her own right, and this
collection of twenty-one well-crafted short stories reveals an impressively
prolific and perceptive artist with a teeming and colorful imagination.
Bondage,
female domination and voyeurism are the author’s unifying themes, whether
pursued as a profession (The Tao of Lust,
Mistress of Carabas) or spiritual
passion (Perhaps—A Worthy Offering),
a lark for curious tourists (A Different Kind
of Reality Show, Private Viewing), therapy (Mr. Smith, Ms. Jones Will See You Now), or the creative pastime of
adventurous married couples (Festival of
Lights, Big Night). King has a gift for revealing the sensual essence of
the commonplace.
Most
of these stories feature contemporary urban settings. King is very much at home
in the clubs and converted loft apartments of Brooklyn. Her characters are more
often than not relatably bourgeois, occupying a world somewhere halfway between
the sterile high-rise heaven of New York’s most extravagant conspicuous
consumers, and the ant-like working stiffs who struggle in the streets below,
whose unstinting—and mostly unseen—efforts truly make the city run.
One
of the most imaginative, deeply engaging stories in the collection—one of the
best I’ve read in some time, in fact—is the absolutely superb Perhaps—A Worthy Offering; atypical in
terms of setting and atmosphere, it delves more deeply into spiritual and
philosophical space, while offering delightfully sensuous entertainment as
well.
The
author, who admits to suffering a great deal from self-doubt, shows the rest of
us how it ought to be done. Her personal demons, hang-ups, worries, and divers
doubts are akin to the irritations that ultimately produce pearls.
Erotica
at its best invites readers to open their minds, to explore the rich quantum
multi-verse of the human condition, correlating our most basic instincts with
our most complex emotions, finding the wormhole-like connections between the
subtlest physical stimuli and the deepest wellsprings of thought. Science
fiction, too, at its finest, tells a richly human story from a uniquely
informed point of view. Whether we call it sf, sci-fi or speculative fiction,
the genre is ultimately “about” illuminating uniquely human truths, exploring
the limits of human potential, ethics, and the nature of imagination
itself.
The
seven stories in this stimulating, sometimes disquieting collection of erotic
speculative fiction portray diverse futures for humanity, some Bladerunner-ishly bleak and gritty,
others gleaming and sterile as the civilization portrayed in Huxley’s Brave New World, though all of them
conceive realms in which technology has either enhanced or fundamentally
altered the physical and psychological boundaries of the sexual experience. Each
story invites the reader to imagine and explore the fascinating erotic potential
of these technological enhancements. Telepathy and shared sensations become a
simple matter of neural interface, as in J. Pape’s Sweet Memories, and A Trap
Self-Sprung by Nalu Kalani, offering a macabre twist on the conventional
D/s narrative, with a bit of tentacle titillation thrown in for good measure.
Sasha Payne’s pulsing, punkish A Sweeter
Science is reminiscent of some of the great post-apocalyptic epics like Bladerunner and Akira—especially the former in its portrayal of forbidden human-robot
love. Docking Maneuvers by Cynthia
Hamilton may be the most purely entertaining story of the bunch, relating a
steamy f/f encounter with some extremely imaginative writing about sex toys of
the future.
Peter
Tupper’s Upgrade is a beautiful,
melancholy, elegiac but ultimately uplifting tale of one man’s final memories
of physical sensation before transitioning to a new form, leaving behind and
transcending the body in order to become a being of pure intellect. But not
abandoning human curiosity. “When there
is no possibility of loss,” Tupper tells us, “action becomes trivial. Even if
we can’t die, We can feel fear, and feel even more ashamed because of that
fear. We need to try new things. We need to find something that scares Us.”
Here,
readers are at last invited to ponder some of the ethical dilemmas posed by
Transhumanist (H+) philosophy. What does it mean to sense, but not to feel? Has
rapid technological advance ultimately doomed humanity in outpacing the natural
course of our evolution? Can even the most sophisticated enhancements ever
truly displace the sublime, simple pleasure of human touch?
Harbowy
has perhaps saved the best for last with Peggy Barnett’s marvelous, lyrical,
horrifying Teneo, Tenere, Tenue. Pygmalion
meets punk in this vision of a world
in which have-nots are forced to scrounge and scavenge while the privileged
classes cast off their corpses, preserving their heads to await a brighter,
even more heavily enhanced future. Here, a young, lonely artist forages medical-waste
dumps, seeking body parts for a new, daringly macabre sculpture, the face like
the image of the Madonna in an ancient icon, the body that of a many-armed
goddess with the discarded hands of dead women.
Science
writer Ronald Bailey has called H+ “the movement that epitomizes the most
daring, creative, imaginative and idealistic aspirations of humanity.” He might
well have been describing the stories in Jacked
In as well.
The
five stories in this intriguingly focused collection of f/f erotic romance draw
inspiration from a wide range of fantasy and speculative fiction, everything
from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking
Glass to The Butterfly Effect, True Blood, Quantum Leap, and the famous Mirror
Mirror episode of the original Star
Trek series. While authors seldom like to be reminded of their
influences—“Gosh! You write just like [insert name here] . . .”—it is the true
artist who knows how to take good preexisting story-stuff and rearrange its
atoms into something dazzlingly novel.
Alternate
realities, whether glimpsed fleetingly in a fitting room mirror (as in R. Anne
Sawyer’s So Quite New a Thing) or
experienced to their sensual full (Reflections
by Kate Dominic) offer a fascinating and diverse range of ideas for fiction.
Quantum possibility (new parallel realities theoretically created by each
choice we make) and alternate personal history are explored with poignant and
powerful effect in Annabeth Leong’s The Universe Where Katie Lived, in which
orgasm itself brings new dimensions into existence—an experience to which many
lovers can well relate. In Kathlene Tudor’s Into
Tipera—perhaps the most heavily traditional-sci-fi influenced story of the
lot—a scientist defies authority and risks her life to prove her theories
concerning the possibility of travel between alternate space/time dimensions.
Vivian Jackson’s Game Fae is a delightful
contemporary fantasy tale wherein an overworked video game designer finds
herself drawn into a world more fascinating and sexy than the most extravagantly
imagined cyber environment. Just one of many delights to be found in this
marvelous collection.
Jeremy
Edwards’ erotic fiction is, as ever, sunlit and cerebral, stylish, sensual and
smart, light as air and heavy as thought. Oh, and did I mention funny? Mustn’t
forget the funny; can’t, in fact, forget it after the two or three times I
nearly passed out from laughing so hard.
Edwards
is clearly in love with language—undoubtedly a good thing for a
writer—fetishizing the idiosyncrasies of words the way almost all his
characters seem to fixate on women’s panties. He likes to toy with connotation;
test the supple bounds of metaphor and innuendo, engage in gentle, nerdish
foreplay with his phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, feel them growing,
changing, metamorphosing under his promiscuously practiced hands, making love
to them, calling new, ever-more pleasantly surprising ideas and images into
existence.
Edwards’
characters are invariably agreeable, thoughtful, introspective,
enthusiastically willing, and astonishingly articulate where discussions of
process are concerned; especially discussions of process occurring during the sex act itself. Look! Nerds
want pretty much the same thing as everybody else. It’s just that sometimes we
like to talk about the things that excite or frighten or turn us on in greater
detail than the average moan or grunt can convey.
The
mood throughout these stories is unchangingly positive, like a two-hour concert
of chamber music played entirely in a sunny C-major; rich in delights to be
sure, and yet, over time the mind needs some variety to stay focused. In the
absence of conflict, most of these stories convey a kind of wry detachment,
rather like the protracted musings of some highly articulate smartass—a
smartass with an abiding derrière fetish, and an obsession for panties as
colorful and varied as the fruit flavors at Baskin-Robins’. Not that any of
this is a bad thing, though, perhaps, the collection ought best be taken in
smaller doses.
Complaints
aside, this is one of the best single-author collections of short erotic
fiction to appear in quite some time; unfailingly droll, effervescent,
stimulatingly abundant, and consistently, happily surprising.
Cover Him with Darkness
is an intense, engaging, grandly imagined, intelligent, entertainingly
well-paced and very—very—sexy story;
erotic romance writ large
Indeed,
all the familiar elements of the typical genre story are here; the smart,
plucky, headstrong heroine, the attractive, gentlemanly, ever-attentive sweet
guy—“Mr. Maybe”—and the hero, the handsome, brooding, dangerous,
perpetually-exciting bad-boy with the deep dark past who sets the heroine’s
heart (among other parts) aquiver in ways the sweet guy never could. Except
this bad boy is really bad—we’re
talking bad on a cosmic scale here. It turns out the “hero” of this romance is
nothing less than a fallen angel:
Ashbless’
young heroine, Milja, takes on the role of Pandora in this mythic morality
play; drawn to the handsome captive imprisoned beneath her family’s small
Orthodox shrine in the mountains of modern Montenegro, her natural curiosity
about the creature is at first colored by pity, and later tinged with lust.
Sensing trouble, her father, a priest of the Serbian Orthodox rite, sends her
away to the US, but the young woman cannot get the image of the bound man out
of her mind, even in bed with her new American boyfriend:
Inevitably,
all hell (or, at least, a substantial part of it) breaks loose when Milja
returns home and frees the angel from his ancient bonds. The story takes
fascinating turns into paranormal action-adventure, ancient Christian myth, and
contemporary ecclesiastical-political intrigue, from medieval Balkan
monasteries and mountain fortresses to the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada
and the New-Age communion of Burning Man.
I
hesitate to draw the obvious comparison here. Ashbless’ tale of ancient texts
and ruthless churchmen at first seems of a piece with some Dan Brown thriller,
though Ashbless is a much better writer—certainly far more intelligent and
imaginative than the purveyor of The Da
Vinci Code. A more apt comparison might be early Anne Rice; in scale and
pacing this novel is pleasingly reminiscent of books like Queen of the Damned, without the tiresome existential inner
monologues or cloying narrative excess that overtook Rice after the first blush
of literary and financial success.
Apparently
the first volume in a projected trilogy, Cover
Him with Darkness ends with a cliffhanger worthy of Lord of the Rings, and leaves us breathless for more!
Is
there any style or genre that M. Christian can’t (or won’t) write in? After
reading this very-fine short story collection from one of today’s most prolific
professionals, I’m leaning heavily towards “no”. The ‘m’ in M. Christian seems
to stand for “multi-faceted”, or possibly “mega-multi-tasker”. The guy
certainly is versatile, as well as daring, imaginative, often funny, and
seldom—if ever—unentertaining, one of those writers who seems to be everywhere
at once, though if he has, in fact, cracked the saintly secret of bi-location,
he’s not talking.
Readers
get a broad sense of Christian’s range in Love
Without Gun Control, the author’s 2009 self-compiled and –published
collection of short fiction, most of which originally appeared in genre
anthologies, now-defunct niche-specific literary magazines and long-since
cached or dead-linked websites. These fourteen stories run a dizzying—and
impressive—gamut of mood and style, each with its own carefully measured ratio
of light to shadow, buoyancy to seriousness, horror to humor, and hope to
despair.
Christian
has clearly learned from, and distilled the essence of the best examples of 20th-century
American fiction, everything from Ray Bradbury and Jack Kerouac to Cormac
McCarthy and Stephen King. He does not shy away from his influences, but has
wisely allowed them to sing through him as he delves the deep, sometimes silly
recesses of the American psyche. The title story is a broad, campy social
satire in addition to being a pitch-perfect sendup of old Western movies and TV
shows, while Wanderlust and Orphans pay dark homage to the uniquely
American mythos of “the road”—think Steinbeck’s musings on Route 66 in The Grapes of Wrath, or the arid,
windswept vistas of Stephen King’s The
Gunslinger and The Stand.
In
Needle Taste, Christian shows that he
is no less adept at horror of the decidedly psychological variety.
Techno-thriller melds seamlessly with High Fantasy in The Rich Man’s Ghost; political satire meets The Zombie Apocalypse
in Buried with the Dead, while knotty
existential drama and the classic Post-Apocalyptic narrative come together in 1,000, and Nothing So Dangerous, a story of love and betrayal in a time of
revolution. Perhaps my favorite stories in this collection are the beautiful,
elegiac, Bradbury-esque Some Assembly
Required, a narrative at once clever and poignant, and the brilliantly
breezy Constantine in Love.
Well worth seeking out--as are all the other titles on this year's Best-of list!
