Synopsis: Grandmaster Award-winner Brian Keene's newest short story collection examines happiness and grief, love and hate, youth and age, and the darkness thriving in the gulf between them. A criminal decides to kill himself by getting healthy. The survivors of the zombie apocalypse find out there's something worse than being dead or living dead. An author's meta-fictional story brings disastrous results. A father discovers that the space between him and his child may be otherworldly. An antediluvian barbarian and a modern-day ex-Amish occultist face off against the same enemy. Your dreams. Your fears. Your hopes. Your regrets. In the hands of Brian Keene, all of them are just... A Little Sorrowed Talk.
I honestly feel weird talking about this one because it's one of the two Night Worms exclusives that I got in the newest subscription box. It's the first book on here that I can't just post a link to so you can grab a copy of your own. However, all the stories were previously published, either on Keene's Patreon or in the following collections: Welcome to the Show Libra Nigrum Scientia Secreta The Rising: Selected Scenes from the End of the World I'm really behind on my Keene TBR, enough so that I haven't gotten into his series work yet. I know that affected my understanding of certain stories, like Through Mirrors Darkly and The Ballad of Koke and Pepsee. The author's notes at the end helped, but overall I enjoyed the standalones more. My favorites: Intersectionality (that ending has turned me into more of a hermit than I already was) The Other (Changeling story!! Loved the characters and the final line) Black Sunrise (eerily beautiful, and contains my favorite passage from the book: "Sunrises come and go, and so do years. You can watch a sunrise in 1988 and another in 2018, and not notice a difference between the two. You may find that in the time between, you went on to become an engineer, or a salesman, or a librarian, or a firefighter, or a mechanic, or a writer. You may be a father to someone, or a husband, or a partner. And you may look back on your life, back over all those sunrises and colors, and think you remember. But you really don't.") Halloween in Cayuga Creek (just plain fun) No Sleep in Brooklyn (this is part of The Rising universe, and I love the glimpse into it. I *am* going to get to the entire series one of these days...) Fear Today, Forgot Tomorrow (heartwrenchingly honest; one of the best meta-fiction pieces I've ever read)
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A WORLD WITH A BLUER SUNMy reviews are set up a little like live-tweets: I write down lines I like/impressions as I read, and then transcribe. Reviews will contain spoilers, but I'll give a warning before they start. Archives
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