Monday Review: Dead Man’s Hand: An Anthology of the Weird West

image via johnjospehadams.com

The General: Which I mean in the “as a whole” way, not the “Custer” way.  As I mentioned when I first typey-typed about this book, I’m not a huge consumer of anthologies, though my attempts to plow through said have increased exponentially since we moved to a city with a decent library system.  While my time remains precious, as does everyone’s, if a library anthology is a clunker, I throw it in the return slot and don’t think about it ever again; if I purchased it and it’s on my shelf or my Kindle, I get tummy rage bees every time I flip past it because damn it, wasted cash, yo.

To catch up folks who may not have seen the previous entry: my major issue with anthologies is the high percentage of meh to middling in most of them; there are always a few standouts and a few puddles of word vomit.  Thing is, it’s the standouts and the word vomit that lend me the feels to give a crap.  Not everything I read has to blow my socks off, as Luke is so fond of saying, but I want to at least have a fleeting thought of, “well, that was fun,” or even, “wow, I’m furious I spent half an hour on that,” when I turn the last page.

Dead Man’s Hand, like most of its brethren, has a few excellents and a few midden heaps.  The difference comes in that the vast majority, rather than being   meh, falls solidly into the good/very good columns.

And it’s not all steampunk!  There’s some of that in Adams’ Weird West, but there’s also frontier fantasy, myth/legend, werewolves, magical lands, and all other manner of crazy town.  Some old ideas dressed up in much more interesting clothing and even some stuff I’ve never seen/considered before.

image via technovelgy.com

The Specifics:

There are 23 stories total.  I have 8 of them marked as “good” to “awesome.”  Actually marked.  Orange sticky notes.  My memory is total shit, dude.

Anyway.  35% good to excellent.  High return.  Very high return.

My favorites?  I’m so glad you asked.

The Hellbound Stagecoach by Mike Resnick: Seriously original twist on the ‘highway to hell’ concept complete with outlaws! Humor! An Igor!  And ye olde time-y truck stop!

Stingers and Strangers by Seanan McGuire: Part of the author’s InCrypted universe, which I didn’t know anything about before but I’m damn interested in now.  Already have a  couple of the novels in my library stack and I can’t wait to see the wider world.  Talking mice!  Wild West crytozoologists! Luv-re! A succubus!

Bookeeper, Narrator, Gunslinger by Charles Yu: Read one of his stories in the Robot Uprisings anthology, with which I was also fairly impressed, and Yu definitely delivers again with swaggering bastards!  Real gunslingers! ESP!

Holy Jingle by Alan Dean Foster: Mysterious giant strangers!  Chinese demon whores!  An entire 24 pages that actually does dialect properly!

Wrecking Party by Alastair Reynolds: Asimov meets the Western!  Clockwork robot spies who can take off their faces!  Gangsters!

Strong Medicine by Tad Williams: Time slips!  Explaination for gaps in fossil record! Familial guilt!

Red Dreams by Jonathan Maberry: Took me a minute to get in to this one and I skipped over it, then went back on a couple different occasions.  Would have been really, really dumb to skip it.  Revenants!  The walking dead but not in the way you think!  A beautiful, tragic friendship!  Immediately requested two of the author’s books from the library!

Dead Man’s Hand by Christine Yant: Turn Left!  The Butterfly Effect (the thing, not the stupid Kutcher flick)!  Fate! Destiny!

Go grab it and then, come back here and let me know what your favorites are.