Stories: All-New Tales edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio

This collection of stories covers a wide range of genres and a wide range of authors. Mostly the stories leaned toward the fantastic or toward horror. I mostly enjoyed this collection, but I don't know that any stuck out so much that I am going to track down more by that author specifically on that story's account. It's really an impressive collection of essays.

The Twelve by Justin Cronin

I found this book a little hard to pick up--but I suspect it would be much easier had I read the previous book, The Passage, more recently. There's a lot of shifting in time in this book: one set of stories shows the actions of a devastated few immediately after the virals escaped--a pregnant doctor so traumatized by the attack she sees that she loses her mind, a lone wolf's escape from the penthouse apartment he'd holed up in, a group's response to the camps the US government set up to control the flood of refugees from infected areas--and the other set of stories is set about one hundred years later, as Amy and a variety of characters from the first book, attempt to destroy the 11 remaining, original virals. Once I figured out what was going on, I enjoyed this book, which was well plotted and well written.

Red, White, and Blood by Christopher Farnsworth

This book is easily the best so far in the President's Vampire series. Although the name of the villain (the Boogeyman) is laughable, his murders are not. At times the descriptions in the book are over the top, but the story was well-plotted and kept me guessing at every turn (especially the last, which sets up a great starting point for the next volume in the series). I thought the campaign trail was a great place to set the series of murders and the book balanced introducing a new villain with the return of old foes nicely. I listened to the audiobook version of this title, and the narrator did a nice job with different voices for the characters.

Looking for Jake by China Miéville

This collection of stories covers a wide range of fantasy; there's one set in Bas-Lag (home of Perdido Street Station, Iron Council, and The Scar), there are a number set in various post-apocalyptic Londons (including The Tain, a novella about vampires and people captured in mirrors), and even an illustrated story. I really enjoyed "'Tis the Season" about a world in which Christmas is so trademarked that you have to buy permission to celebrate. The stories were all good. Once again Miéville shows off his endlessly inventive and entertaining imagination.

Blood Lite III: Aftertaste edited by Kevin J. Anderson

This collection was better than the first two because fewer of the stories fell flat. I still think that there's a high percentage of stories that don't quite get the humor, but Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden story was great. The shorter stories (such as the contract provided by the Maleficium software company) were often funnier (and more unique in execution) than the longer ones. I might suggest that Harry Dresden fans just read the Jim Butcher story, rather than spend all the time with the whole collection.

Home Improvement: Undead Edition edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni Kelner

This collection contains stories focused on home improvement of some type or another. While the quality was uneven, I really enjoyed the Sookie Stackhouse story. Generally this collection worked fairly well. There was a fair amount of humor in some of these stories, and it generally worked.

Blood Lite II: Overbite by Kevin J. Anderson

Like its predecessor, this collection of short stories didn't strike me as particularly funny. I think the collection suffers from the focus on humor--the stories weren't all that funny. Also, several of them had worldsystems/mythologies that were hard to parse for a short story (like they were taken from complicated, longer series).

Crimes by Moonlight: Mysteries from the Dark Side edited by Charlaine Harris

This collection of stories focuses on crimes with a supernatural element. The first story ("Dahlia Underground" by Charlaine Harris) and the last story ("Taking the Long View" by Tori Kelner) worked the best for me; the rest seemed to vary in quality and originality. At times many of the stories in the collection seemed to take the easy way out--with a supernatural twist--rather than giving a satisfactory, fully-worked up ending.

Down These Strange Streets edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois

This anthology contains short stories loosely united by what the editors call urban fantasy. I enjoyed the Lord John story in this anthology ("Lord John and the Plague of Zombies" by Diana Gabaldon) more than any of the other Lord John stories (and really, more than most of the recent Outlander books). "Death by Dahlia," a new Charlaine Harris story set in the Sookie Stackhouse universe was also entertaining. There was a story that featured Dashiell Hammett and another that seemed a clear take on The Maltese Falcon. I enjoyed the stories set in Rome (there were two). There was also a good one about a jazz musician. A few had mythological worlds so complex, it was hard to figure out what the rules were in the course of the story. Overall a very entertaining collection.

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text by Mary Shelley

In this edition of Frankenstein, we get Mary Shelley's earliest take on the story. I was particularly interested in following Shelley's ideas about developing familial and community structures. I was also surprised (again) with the monster's eloquence--no dumb brute here! Finally Victor Frankenstein seemed to be much more of a selfish jerk than I had previously thought him.

Death's Excellent Vacation edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni Kelner

I found this collection of stories to be uneven at best. While I really enjoyed "Two Blondes," the Sookie Stackhouse story that starts the collection, and several in the rest of the collection, other stories struck me as dull or clichéd. I'd recommend skipping around if you pick this collection up.

Witches on the Road Tonight by Sheri Holman

This book deftly links the story of a young boy who encounters two WPA artists while growing up in Appalachia with that of the way the family of a small time television entertainer is torn apart when they bring a foster boy into their midst. There's a lot of piecing together that the reader has to do for herself, but I especially enjoyed the parts set in rural Virginia. The television show, which seems to be a sort of low-budget, local market Mystery Science Theater 3000, features Captain Casket (CAP/TAN/CASKT, the Casketeers sing, in a parody of the Mickey Mouse Club song that Disney would shut down faster than you can say "Jimney Cricket" today), and is one of the most entertaining and imaginative bits of the story.

The Black Vampyre by Uriah Derick D'Arcy

This book, which is perhaps more accurately described as a pamphlet, continues to amaze me. It's formally a mess: there's a short story (hard to call it a novel, when it clocks in at less than 50 small pages), and a long poem about vampirism. While the story starts as your typical horror story, it quickly becomes a critique of a wide variety of things, including but not limited to capitalism, plagiarism, and slavery.

The Shining by Stephen King

This book is every bit as creepy as the Stanley Kubrick film version, although the differences (which are subtle at first) completely change the character of Jack and the nature of the story's ending. Although the book is long, and the creepiness builds much more slowly than it does in the film, at the end you can hardly stand to put it down--and I don't think I could have read it while I was entirely alone in the house. In fact, I'd recommend summer as an ideal season to read this book. The supernatural is much more pronounced, and much more in control in the book than the movie, but the book still manages to think harder about the questions of addiction and anger that fuel Jack Torrence's descent, and about family more generally--in the movie I never could quite understand how Wendy, whiny and useless though she is, could put up with such a creep of a husband--but the book shows both Jack and Wendy to be much more sympathetic, realistic, and nuanced characters. All in all, read this book--but only during the day!

American Fantastic Tales: Terror and The Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps (Volume I) edited by Peter Straub

This collection is one to be savored. I have read it slowly, but I can't think of one story that disappointed me. I found it to be creepy and wonderful. I read many familiar authors here, but I had read only three of the forty-four stories before--and these are forgotten gems, rather than hidden stinkers. There were also lots of new writers to meet. I highly recommend this collection if you're looking for something gothic. I can't wait to get into volume two.