Review: Logan's Run Continues
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 10, 2012
Someone forgot to tell John A A Logan that short story collections don't sell. Or maybe he just didn't listen. Either way, the result is win-win-win: in his second outing for Amazon, Logan has raised the bar once again with an astonishing, and unified, work of art--not a ragtag assembly of tales. Amazon wins every time an artist of Logan's stature Direct Publishes on Kindle. Readers win through their exposure to first-rate original ebooks--first-rate, Uptown reading at a fraction of the price they pay for hardbound books by the accepted Literary Stars. And Logan wins in knowing he hung in tough, sat and bled, and has put out a second book that he was born to write.The first reviewer, Leila Smith, has already provided an excellent guide to the stories themselves. I can't do any better. Nor can I improve on her reference to the book as 'elemental'. When I finished reading, I felt as if I'd just been flown from Kansas to Katmandu by a five-star hurricane. And that's not the result of any tale alone, though some do pack a primal kick. The collective force of the book is the thing, the way the tales have been arranged: segueing without even cracking a sweat from sci-fi/fantasy to revenge/redemption to ghost story to fable to metamorphosis...The sense is further reinforced by the almost uniform length of the stories. (Though my Kindle copy is unpaginated, I did note that each of the stories runs to about ten percent.) This Electric Literary Cowboy is a classicist in his sense of structure and order.And, oh yes, the book will sell as the good word spreads: a hurricane has just hit town...and it makes for a helluva flight.