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Last Exit to Forever: Borderlands (ed. Thomas F. Monteleone)

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                                                                                                        Elephant in the room: There's a lot you can say about Tom Monteleone, and a lot of it isn't great. I acknowledge that. So why showcase Borderlands ? Because I don't think the smoke from the bridges he's burned should blot out the frequently incredible accomplishments of the writers who made the Borderlands anthology series one of the most exciting and vital I've ever read. And it was good from the get-go in 1990: Some of the stories here are award-winning classics; others are oddball pieces that deserve more attention than they've gotten.  The Calling by David B. Silva Synops...
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It's 12 O Clock Somewhere: Midnight Somewhere (Johnny Compton)

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                                                                                     I've mostly avoided doing single-author collections on here, which is mainly so I can maximize variety. I love short story collections of every kind, but anthologies provide  which is mainly for variety. Short story collections are a shotgun shell versus the concentrated single rifle bullet of a novel. But even with shotguns, you have choke tubes, which concentrate the shot into a tighter group over a longer range . If a multi-author collection is open choke/cylinder bore (no concentration, with a wider spread), then single-author collections are like a full choke with a tighter pattern....
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Bloch Party: Monsters in Our Midst (ed. Robert Bloch)

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                                                                                                           Yup, it's MORE early '90s TOR anthologies! I'll switch it up at some point, but I've been meaning to read this for a bit. Bloch did two anthologies for TOR in this time period--this one and Psycho-Paths ; both cashed in on his most famous creations, Psycho and Norman Bates, and focused on psychological horror and human evil. This is a good one.  Snow Man by John Coyne Synopsis : A Peace Corps teacher in Ethiopia finds himself at odds with his students. Thoughts : This is a difficult story to evaluate because I think it's very well-written but also found it almost...
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Double-Ax Chromosomes! Women of Darkness II (ed. Kathryn Ptacek)

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                                                                                                 We're back for more women in horror with round two of Kathy Ptacek's Women of Darkness anthologies. Something I think is interesting about this book compared to the last one is there's more of a lack of catharsis. Many of the stories seem to set up rape-revenge or similar scenarios, but the revenge doesn't come, or does in a way that's not exactly satisfying. So that will require talking about spoilers in a few elements, so you should just go get a copy of this book and read it and then come back and we can chat about it all, okay?  Assuming you've done that. . . The Co-op by Melanie Tem Synopsis : A g...
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