his review is incomplete since I didn't get through more than half a dozen of the stories in the book.

The Mammoth Book of The Best New Horror, #14, edited by Stephen Jones
Overall: 4

The various category reviews can't be applied here, since this is a collection of horror stories, and the quality varies greatly from story to story.  I also can't give a thorough review, since I didn't read the whole collection. I got through about the first 6 or 7 stories, and when none of them did much for me, I gave up and moved on to other books and activities. Life's too short to toil through mediocrity just to file a review on it. Especially when you're not being paid for the chore.

If you like horror short stories (I do) you might enjoy this one, and I'm sure there are a few really good tales in it. I didn't see any in the 1/4 of the book I read, but none of the ones I read were really awful; they just weren't anything special. Some interesting ideas but not much follow through, and others were written very well but had nothing to say and no real story; just some nice character description. That's true for 99% of short stories though, including mine.

It's extremely difficult to produce a really good short story: one that's original, interesting, has a nice fast pace, good characters, some action, and some resolution.  Early Clive Barker efforts are the only ones I can recommend as consistently top notch. Most of the award winning type stories I see aren't really "stories." They're nicely written, detailed scenes, or memories, or ideas. Two people talking, one remembering something from her childhood, and then a metaphoric conclusion. Brilliantly-written, but not really a story, in that they lack a plot, conflict, climax, or resolution. If nothing happens then it's a scene, not a story. By my classification, anyway.

Packing in an introduction, character information and descriptions, scene, setting, conflict, action, reaction, conversation, rising tension, climax, and resolution, and writing it all well, in under 30 or 40 pages, is virtually impossible. Writers either go too long and turn it into a novella, or don't have any real action or conflict or climax, or none of the characters every change any, etc. I'm not saying that 99.9% of short stories suck, it's just that they don't check every box to qualify as "great" or "brilliant" stories. They can be enormously enjoyable, despite the fact that they lack a few of the requisite elements to achieve greatness, but I'm talking about masterpieces here, and the list is necessarily very short.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.