Sides, Chris
AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE:
3 out of 5
(1 book)
Dark Matter II
(Art by Paul Moore, Charlie Hogg, Chris Travell, Randy Haldeman, Ken Reynolds, Matt Harrower, Aljosa Tomic, Jim Lavery and Dan Cornwell)
An anthology of six stories which, as the blurb on the back cover says, have no happy endings. These stories feature time travel, cannibals, derelict space stations and zombies.
These stories are all short and punchy, with twist-in-the-tale endings that cause you to re-evaluate everything that comes before it. For me the highlight was the story of how the zombie apocalypse gets started in the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin (I've sat and had a pint in more or less the exact spot that the story ends).
Unfortunately, due to this being a very short book overall and therefore the stories themselves being extremely short, none of the interesting ideas introduced really gets enough room to develop into something special. It feels a bit like a scattershot approach on the part of the writer to see what they should develop into a full story later. Ultimately, though, the brief nature of the stories will leave you intrigued but somewhat unsatisfied.
3 out of 5