This was a last-minute addition to my vacation book pile, based on the recommendation of the bookstore. I was expecting ghost and monster stories, perfect for a camping trip, and while there are those in this collection, most stories were stronger as allegories about North American colonialism, generational trauma, and disrespect of nature and the land. While that made sense in some stories, it felt overall very heavy handed, and some genuinely creepy stories were ruined by the need to bludgeon the reader with social commentary.
The stories are of highly variable quality, as if some were written in a rush to be included in this collection and to meet a certain formula rather than the general category of “dark fiction”. I suppose I should have clued in – the introduction by Stephen Graham Jones should have been a warning that I was going to be disappointed.
Fate: little book library
1 – a murder
18 – short stories
37 – non-mainstream
38 – drivel
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