Spinrad, People’s Police (2017)

Norman Spinrad, The People’s Police. Tor Books, 2017. Pp 284. ISBN 978-0-7653-8427-0. $27.99.

Reviewed by Cait Coker

The very best satires have enough truth at the core of their fiction to make them uncomfortable reading, and so is the case with Norman Spinrad’s The People’s Police. Spinrad is perhaps best known for his self-proclaimed anarchic ideals in his fiction, which fully come into play here: the central question asked is “Suppose the people and the police, who are so often on opposing sides in the US, actually came together for the benefit of all?” In this world, the order of government authority (and business world corruption) is at odds with everyday people and with the chaotic loa spirits, with the soul of New Orleans itself at stake: does the city belong to its everyday inhabitants or to the distant politicians and visiting tourists?

Oliver (ed.), Five Stories High (2016)

Jonathan Oliver (ed.), Five Stories High. Solaris Books, 2016. Pp. 435. ISBN 978-1-781083-92-5. £7.99.

Reviewed by Rachel Verkade

I am not going to lie, when I saw the new Jonathan Oliver anthology on this month’s list of titles to review, I all but got on my hands and knees and begged for it to be given to me. I have read all of Oliver’s previous anthologies, and were it not for their low number I would be putting Oliver’s name up there with that of the incomparable Ellen Datlow on my personal list of favourite anthologists. Add to that the fact that this anthology featured five interconnected novellas centered around a haunted house, one of my favourite horror sub-genres, and you had one happy reviewer. So, did my happiness hold?

Let’s start with the basics. Five Stories High is a collection of five novellas, all centered around Irongrove Lodge; a centuries-old building that has been, at different times, a sanitarium, a rest home, a family home, divided into apartments… and in every one of its incarnations, dark, inexplicable events occurred within its walls. These novellas tell the stories of five such events, and are bookended by various ‘Notes on Irongrove Lodge’ written by Oliver. These five stories are all very different and connected only by their setting, so I think it’s best to look at them each individually.

Begay, Edgar Allan Poe: Adult Coloring Book (2016)

Odessa Begay, Edgar Allan Poe: An Adult Coloring Book. Sterling Publishing, 2016. Pp. 96. ISBN 978-1-45492-135-6. $14.95.

Reviewed by Valeria Vitale

Edgar Allan Poe: An Adult Coloring Book by Odessa Begay is a fun experiment in mixing the darkest literature with the playful experience of messing around with colours. The large, coffee-table format, and the very attractive cover with metallic-red details make this book something that won’t go unnoticed. Unfortunately, sometimes the quality of the drawings is not as good as one might hope, and the occasionally careless execution leaves one with the feeling of a missed opportunity.

Clarke, Galactic Empires (2017)

Neil Clarke (ed.), Galactic Empires. Night Shade Books, 2017. Pp. 624. ISBN 978-1-59780-884-2. $17.99.

Reviewed by Don Riggs

I opened Neil Clarke’s anthology Galactic Empires and Jeffty was five again! So many of the dear old exciting space operatic epic short story types but written in a fresh vein, as if tales of, in, and around Galactic Empires had been ongoing and are indeed still evolving! Instead of proceeding methodically from the first story to the last in sequence, I skipped right to the Robert Silverberg, “The Colonel Returns to the Stars,” knowing that the author has developed planets, empires, histories, and tales of people hidden in other people, submerged personalities looking out through the eyes of some apparently other people. He did not disappoint, and brought hints of an ancient empire that had gone long before the current empire arose, resulting in two networks of instantaneous transmission through wormholes from place to place. He uses the trope of that kind of instantaneous travel much as Frank Herbert did in Dune: the threat of a world denied access to those portals describes the ultimate in isolation on the galactic scale: it becomes a world set back on its own resources, denied trade and contact with anyone else besides that world’s own inhabitants, who are stuck with each other. An interesting dilemma.