A Blink of the Screen
by Terry Pratchett (Doubleday, 2012); audiobook read by Michael Fenton Stevens & Stephen Briggs (Isis, 2012)
With the exception of ‘The Sea and Little Fishes’, this collection of short stories and miscellanea (some Discworld, some not) is sadly lacking, at least by Pratchett’s standards. The qualities that brought his novels alive simply don’t lend themselves to shorter fiction.
Doctor Who: Forever Fallen
by Joshua Wanisko; audiobook read by Nicholas Briggs (Big Finish, 2016)
A nicely low-key story exploring one of Doctor Who’s great untapped questions: what would happen if the villain just stopped when given the chance to rethink his megalomaniacal scheme? Between them, Wanisko and Briggs capture some of the Seventh Doctor’s melancholic brooding.
The Father of Lies
by K J Parker (Subterranean, 2018)
A 500+ page compendium of Parker’s recent short fiction, focussing in particular on those pieces depicting gods, devils, magic and religion. As ever, Parker crafts believable worlds in which to tell fantastic, habitually mordant, stories. Anti-heroes abound and suffer for their sins.
Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View
(Del Rey, 2017)
Star Wars fanatics may enjoy reconstructing A New Hope from this collection of short stories, each moving a peripheral character to centre stage. Mostly, though, background characters have been placed there for a reason. Some of these tales are truly, epically pointless.
The Inimitable Jeeves
by P. G. Wodehouse (Herbert Jenkins, 1923); audiobook read by Jonathan Cecil (BBC, 1990/2009)
This fix-up novel brings together eleven Jeeves & Wooster short stories, the linking thread of which is Bertie’s friend Bingo Little, whose compulsive falling in love brings endless trouble to his old school chum. Jonathan Cecil’s reading lends zest to the mishaps.
The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories
by Joan Aiken (Small Beer Press, 2016)
This posthumous collection spans thirty-five years of Joan Aiken’s prolific career. The stories, though frequently lacking in closure, are beautifully written, with rich, dark ideas and a wondrous touch of fairy tale logic. Aiken’s characterisation of people (and notably, animals) is exquisite.
The Robot Who Looked Like Me
by Robert Sheckley (Sphere, 1978)
A short fiction collection in which the reader is promised (and given) satire, inventiveness and humour, but also off-the-cuff storytelling, an intrusive sexual focus, a name writer’s complacency and maddening, devil-may-care flights of fancy that lead nowhere under the guise of surrealism.
Cherry Crow Children
by Deborah Kalin (Twelfth Planet Press, 2015)
Shadows of fairy tale horror lurk beneath this cohesively themed collection of fantasy stories, Deborah Kalin demonstrating her characteristic narrative poise in immersing readers within her Grimm but exquisitely built worlds, then leaving them and protagonists both prey to a dark undertow.
The Cemetery Man (and Other Darkside Tales)
by Bill Pronzini (Perfect Crime Books, 2014)
Bill Pronzini’s great talent for capturing character and setting, so effective in his mystery novels, is frittered away in this collection of dark short fiction spanning 1976-2013, yielding mostly unsatisfying vignettes and denouements that rest on skewed reinterpretations of the stories’ titles.