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This is an incredibly strange collection, filled with bizarre ideas and twists. What it lacked (and this is so common in collections) was consistency. I’ll be honest, I almost gave up after the first couple of pieces. I didn’t care at all for the title piece, and worried that the stories wouldn’t improve.

Happily, I was wrong. There were several that will stick with me for quite some time. I made a pact with myself that, if I wasn’t feeling a story after the first several pages, I could skip it and move ahead. In so doing, I discovered that about half of the stories didn’t catch me. The half that did, however, were worth the effort.

I would recommend reading this collection, but only when you are able to fully concentrate and take the time to unwrap the strange gifts inside at your own pace. And it’s ok to skip stories you aren’t feeling. I promise that any fan of weird fiction will find something to provoke inside.

This book, for me, suffered from a real lack of tonal focus. It started strong, with the introduction of a likable protagonist, but due to tonal shifts and my own difficulty with keeping characters straight in my head (more on that later) I gradually lost interest.

My problem with the tone is that Scalzi couldn't pick a lane. The whiplash between witty banter and more serious science fiction didn’t allow me as a reader to settle into either groove, to the detriment of the book.

As for the other difficulty, I hesitate to even bring it up because it makes me sound old and angry. I’m not really either of those things and am really open-minded across the board. But the character names in this novel were very confusing. Most were so foreign sounding that my mind had trouble matching the pictures in my brain to the names on the page. None of the names had a face or me, and since so much of the book was groups of people working together and sparring verbally, it all started to run together for me. None of the side characters really had any character at all. I really hope this doesn’t sound crazy or racially motivated. It was a point of confusion for me, and the writing suffered for it in my eyes.

In fact, I don’t recall there being much, if any, character descriptions at all to help attach faces to names. So for me, the result of using difficult names and failing to provide some description of the characters was a story that didn’t allow me to connect much with anyone other than the main protagonist and antagonist. And the pilot. He was pretty cool.

I lost interest in this one, but I loved the idea. I didn’t hate it and I didn’t love it. A perfect 2.5 star book.

Truth be told, I’m not generally a guy who reads a series. By and large, I like books that stand alone. But I find myself really enjoying Sandman Slim as a character, and this is my favorite read of the series so far.

It’s not extremely complex, so it’s easy to pick up even if it’s been a while since you read the last book. That’s great for me, as it’ll be there when I’m not in the mood to read anything else. The characters are well written and there is far more grey than black and white almost across the board, which keeps things interesting.

I read the second installment as well, but didn’t review it since it would’ve read similarly to my first review of the series. But I’m checking back in to say that it’s getting better by the book. Recommended for anyone who likes magical realism, urban fantasy, and Sam Spade.

What if everyone in the world stopped sleeping? How long would we survive without rehabilitative rest, and who would be best at surviving without sleep? Who would be most at risk? And could we find a cure?

This novel, a fictional oral history of the end of the world, deals with these hypotheticals. Without warning or apparent cause, the end of the world is brought about by a mass insomnia event. People simply become unable to sleep, and since the record for living without sleep is eleven days, it seems like it will be a quick end to humankind.

I’m not spoiling anything by saying people start to sleep again and the danger passes. But only 8% of the pre-insomnia population survives, leaving the world depressed, underpopulated, and on the edge of the end.

As with any good oral history, author H. G. Bells uses individual stories and experiences to paint the larger picture, adding humanity to an overwhelming idea. Unfortunately, I actually started to lose interest. By the end, with none of the big questions having been answered, I felt robbed.

Presented as a series of vignettes and very short stories, it moved at a pretty solid pace. But once people knew what was going on, it lost steam for me. Yes, people were cranky and tired, and as time passed they became more apt to hallucinate and overdose on stimulants. That’s really about it.

There were some frightening stories out of hospitals, especially those having to do with pregnancies. Some of the coping strategies were interesting. And, as expected, humans are the REAL danger.

I judge this sort of novel by how it stacks up against World War Z, and while it was certainly trying hard, Sleep Over doesn’t really hold its own. Entertaining enough, but just not enough oomph for almost 400 pages.

This one wasn’t my cup of tea at all, and I was forced to use my “read ten pages and skip it if it’s dull” prerogative. I skipped most of the stories in this collection. That said, there were two that will likely stick with me for quite a while.

The first was “The Clay Party” by Steve Duffy, a nasty little tale from the Oregon Trail as told through news clippings and diaries. If you like settlers lost in the snow, you’ll like this one.

The second was a nice piece by one of today’s best - Stephan Graham Jones. “Lonegan’s Luck” is the story of a frontier snake oil salesman who travels from town to town in the old west, leaving very little behind. I’ll leave it at that. Jones knows how to tell a story, and this one is more than a little bit upsetting.

Otherwise, I was unimpressed by this lot as a whole. It seemed like literary horror, but it ended up just being dull. I know there are better stories out there.

This book, another killer novel from Catriona Ward, is a deep look into mother/ daughter relationships, nature versus nurture, and the damage that secrets can do. In my opinion, Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street will go down as a classic, so I was excited to pick this one up.

I’m glad I did, though I’ll warn readers that the first third of this book is a tough read. It’s focused on an extremely abusive marriage and a very pained family. It was hard to read, and I’m mostly immune to horrors true or otherwise.

As the story progresses, with jumps in time and as told by multiple narrators, pieces begin to fall into place and the story fills in. Again, Ward shows extreme mastery of language, keeping me wondering and guessing throughout. Watch her, because her verbal sleight of hand is amazing. You won’t know the whole story until you’ve done the work to get there, and you’ll be led down more than one dead end path.

If you are bothered by very realistic physical and mental abuse, or by scientific animal testing, be aware that this book pushes those buttons. Hopefully you can get past that and read one of the more bizarre, yet heartfelt, mother / daughter novels I’ve ever read.

Written in 1976, Joan Sampson’s only novel is an amazing piece of allegorical fiction that seems to be ripped directly from today’s headlines. It tells the story of a small New Hampshire community that is bullied and conned into giving up everything it loves by an auctioneer who promises freedom and joy but delivers only pain, suffering, and loss.

There are so many connections between the story and today, but the big takeaway is that evil can only survive when it remains in the darkness and no one acts. Only sunlight and communication can take down the auctioneer, but the damage is irreparable by the time the community figures it out.

The chilling bit, and the line that will always stick with me is the following, spoken by the auctioneer at a town meeting in the final pages: Whatever I’ve done, you let me do.

An excellent read, and one that drives home the evil of the world today in the same way allegories like Animal Farm did.

When the best of us remain silent, the worst of us take control.

The description above is accurate. These are 26 dark and humorous short stories. Some are so short that they could even be classified as vignettes or sketches, but that isn’t a knock all. I have great respect for anyone who can write something this short and this tight and still make me feel something. In fact, a couple of these stories tore my heart out.

These shorts are hard to classify. I’d have to say that many of them lean toward horror, though it’s the type of thoughtful horror that someone like Ray Bradbury might write. The collection is filled with nods toward classic horror monsters including the Wolf Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Frankenstein’s monster, but never in the ways you might imagine. There are also some terrible human monsters, as well as some pretty awful situations.

But I feel like horror doesn’t complete the label. Most of these - the ones that want to be, anyway - are extremely funny. I laughed FAR more than anything else as I read, so it’s definitely comedic.

Dark humor is the appropriate shelf for this book, I suppose. But it feels like so much more. Definitely one of the strongest collections I’ve read in some time.

Koepp had a chance to really hit it out of the park with this novel, but I think he buried the lede. This end of the world scenario - a worldwide power outage caused by an explosion on the sun and a direct hit of energy that overloads and destroys most of Earth’s electrical capabilities - is ok. But add to that the fact that it happens shortly after the Covid pandemic, and you really have something.

Our nerves and psyches already raw and cracked, how would we react to yet another worldwide challenge?

He lays it out there, and then goes on to write a rather paint-by-numbers account of the struggles of one family and the people in their lives. I was willing this novel to delve more into the post-Covid aspects of his characters, but he didn’t really do it enough for me.

Frankly, I listened to this one as an audio book while driving from gig to gig recently, but if I had been reading it from the page, I probably would have quit and picked up something else.

I kept hoping for something more, and feel like Koepp missed a real opportunity here to show us how people who are still reeling from one catastrophe deal with being handed another one.