Review: The Good, the Bad, and the Awful...a handful of each
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 18, 2012
Another collection of short stories, and like the first anthology (No Good Deed), the connection to the River City novels is in there, it's just not always prevalent. And similar to the first anthology, the final product is uneven at best. There are a few good stories, but many of the offerings remind me of what a high school course of Beginning Story-Writing would produce. Some of these are so bad they left me seriously considering abandoning the rest of the book. Instead of 17 short stories, many of which were too short on plot, detail, and ending, I'd have preferred half as many stories with somewhat more complete and conclusive plotlines. The book's final story (Alan Hart) was well worth the price of admission, but I had to slog through an uneven bunch of good, so-so, and downright bad stories to get there. FWIW, I absolutely loved the first three River City novels, but so far these anthologies leave a lot to be desired, in my opinion.