books

Bradley Denton

Books: Fantasy | Short Stories

Anthologies

Down These Strange Streets (2011), Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations (2013)

Down These Strange Streets (2011) edited by Gardner Dozois & George R. R. Martin

If you look at the list of authors above, you'll immediately see why I read this series. There are some of my favorite authors here–many of whom write short stories I tend to love. And surprisingly, I loved most of these stories, especially a few by authors I haven't particularly read before.

Bradley Denton's story "The Adakian Eagle" piqued my interest because in the past year I read another mystery also based upon Raymond Chandler's time spent in Alaska / with the Aleutians during WWII. This is really an interesting historical tidbit that I guess I'm surprised hasn't come up more frequently. Aside from Raymond Chandler and the Aleutians, that's where parallels to the other story end. In this case a young man seems to be at the mercy of his Lt Col, and a strange discovery leads him to work with a Private named Pops. I quite enjoyed this story as well.

All in all, I found this to be a fabulous anthology, and I highly recommend almost all the stories I read–even the ones I didn't love were, for the most part, interesting.

Published by Penguin

Rating: 9/10

Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations (2013) edited by Paula Guran

weird-detectives-recent-investigationsThis is a collection of short stories previously published elsewhere, so I'd already read several of these stories. But there were several I had not, and several of the ones I'd read before were well worth reading again.

This book has been sitting around for awhile, waiting to be read, primarily because I got it in trade paperback, and it's huge and heavy–just the kind of book I hate reading. Too heavy and too bulky for comfortable reading. But the stories drew me in and didn't let me go. (Though the book itself was why I lacked patience for stories I'd recently read or didn't catch my interest immediately.)

Initially, I was just going to flip through and read stories by authors I love, but then I ended up just reading straight through. Having no patience, if I story didn't immediately grab hold, I didn't finish it, and if I hadn't thoroughly enjoyed it the first time (or had read the story very recently), I didn't give it a second read.

As I said, this contained a lot of stories I'd read previously, but they are for the most part good stories, so if you don't have the original anthologies, this would be well worth getting.

Published by Prime Books

Rating: 8/10