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Allusion is not Illusion
You'll pry my books off my cold, dead body. By the time you shift them all I'll be flat and dessicated.
Currently reading
Winter's Tales
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Already Dead
The Rings of Saturn
Lady Audley's Secret
Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People" - And How You Can Fight Back
The City, Not Long After
You Can Sketch: A Step-by-Step Guide for Absolute Beginners
Lonely Werewolf Girl
Aside from two or three good stories, this collection was quite boring. A pity, because often the writing was fine and the ideas original (insofar as the vampire-sucking-things-other-than-blood ever is... That "twist" has been around for decades and I don't understand why authors seem to keep thinking they're doing something "novel"), but most of them were just not good reads. Most were low on dialog, action, character development and everything else that makes fiction fun. It really felt like most of the entries were not really "short stories" at all but rather condensations or abstracts of longer works, with longer spans of time or more complicated ideas crushed into dense, slow descriptive passages. The stand-out was Margo Lanagan's horrific "Mulberry Boys," which has no vampires but is essentially a critique of capitalism and consumerism, Elizabeth Bear's "Needles" monster road-trip.