This is a collection of four novellas, each roughly in the horror genre. The theme is strange weather, though that only really applies to the last two stories, "Aloft" and "Rain". The first story, "Snapshot", is almost a classic King style horror, with a possessed item affecting people's lives, but the second, "Loaded", is the most distinctive, being the only story with no fantastic elements.
Of all four, I most enjoyed Snapshot. In this, a small boy discovers a menace in his neighborhood, a strange man with a camera that has an evil use. Over the course of several days, the boy must protect people from this camera's malign influence and try to hunt down the cruel photographer.
It's written with a tight pace, giving some real tension to what could be a very silly story in other hands. The battle between boy and photographer leaps off the page, and the final confrontation is utterly compelling.
By contrast, Loaded is rather leaden. It is nominally centred around a mass shooting, and the effect it has on the community around it, while following the life of the security guard who is first on the scene and the journalist investigating what happened in his past. However, it is mostly a political lecture about the American gun culture problem and the systemic racism present in the country.
Politics has its place in fiction, but this seems to lack any nuance. The pro-gun characters possess no real redeeming characteristics and the anti- are almost cartoonishly good. It's a slog to get through, and doesn't really have anything interesting to say.
Aloft is a little more out there, featuring a skydiver who finds himself falling out of his plane and almost immediately onto a sentient cloud. Nice premise, dodgy execution. It doesn't really offer much variety as the plot runs on, and I didn't care enough about the protagonist to be worried about whether or not he'd escape. It also really lacked any major tension.
I had a much stronger emotional response to the main character of the final story, but unfortunately it was that I found her incredibly annoying. In a world in which glass rain has started falling for the sky, making the weather deadly, she ventures across the unforgiving landscape to carry a message. And on the way she wins every moral argument she's a part of, exceeds in every challenge and manages to be utterly unlikable.
It's a collection with a decent spread of stories, but I can't say I enjoyed them particularly. (Except Snapshot, that was great.)
Not recommended.
Tagged: Book Horror Anthology Print