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Short story collections tend to run on a unified theme, like, "here be dragons" or "a collection of introspective plumber prose." This anthology is unified by how collectively weird and dark its themes are, and something usually dies. It has got dark speculative, dark humor, dark sci-fi, horror, and one dark high fantasy that looks like it travelled from the 1970s and came over to say "Hi!" Publisher did a good job making a genre sandwich, so you're not getting 3 sci-fis back to back. Random call out, but greatly appreciated.

Highlights: The first story is a great opener and has one of those stories that are told that when you finish it and think it over the reader gets a whole other narrative on top of it. It's clever. The last one has an amazing POV, it's funny, great voice.

Lows: For the virus-themed story, I wish it was longer and threw in some additional hijinx. I figured there could be a bit more added to it following the ending, so I would have liked to have seen more. As well, because the dark theme unifies all of the stories it becomes a waiting game of how X will be screwed over. Because that is so consistent it's hard to feel cheated at least.

PSA: If you like dogs, there is one story that is probably triggering. Otherwise, it's hilarious.