Bump in the Night anthology
Mar. 31st, 2006 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jmc_bksI'm of two minds about anthologies. On one hand, I appreciate the opportunity to try authors that I might not otherwise pick up. But often I only like one story out of four or five, which means they are almost never worth the price, even if I buy them at a discount. In my opinion, novellas and short stories are harder to do well than full length books, if only because there is a limited amount of space in which to develop characters and plot. Even talented writers like Nora Roberts are not immune to the novella problem. I bought this one for the J.D. Robb novella, Haunted in Death, which was fairly good, but not the best Robb novella I've read (Midnight in Death gets my vote for that). It was probably a solid B grade. In this case, since Haunted in Death includes a cast of characters that many readers already know, much less development is needed. But the story still shows the limits of the format.
I liked the idea of the second story, Poppy's Coin by Mary Blaney, but felt like it too needed a great deal more space for the author to share the backstories of the hero and heroine. While it wasn't a bad story, it didn't grab my attention enough to make me go looking for other books by Blaney. A B-.
The third story, The Passenger by Ruth Ryan Langan, actively sucked. Rambling, leaving a bunch of threads undone, pointless. A solid D in my book.
I enjoyed the last story in the anthology, in part because it reminded me of a movie that I used to like but haven't watched in ages: Drop Dead Fred. Except in the case of Mary Kay McComas's Mellow Lemon Yellow, the heroine's imaginary friend was much more benign than Fred was, and had a good influence of her. B again, even though objectively there are things about the story that don't work well.
I liked the idea of the second story, Poppy's Coin by Mary Blaney, but felt like it too needed a great deal more space for the author to share the backstories of the hero and heroine. While it wasn't a bad story, it didn't grab my attention enough to make me go looking for other books by Blaney. A B-.
The third story, The Passenger by Ruth Ryan Langan, actively sucked. Rambling, leaving a bunch of threads undone, pointless. A solid D in my book.
I enjoyed the last story in the anthology, in part because it reminded me of a movie that I used to like but haven't watched in ages: Drop Dead Fred. Except in the case of Mary Kay McComas's Mellow Lemon Yellow, the heroine's imaginary friend was much more benign than Fred was, and had a good influence of her. B again, even though objectively there are things about the story that don't work well.
