Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions

Paranormal is really big in teen fiction right now...and has been for quite awhile. It can be tiresome reading over and over again about vampires, angels, werewolves, and other creatures of the night. But put a new spin on it, and the subject comes to life again. I don't see this teen phenomenon coming to a close anytime soon, but if you want to see the subject in a new light (i.e. without all the romance), check out Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions, an anthology of short stories by sixteen different female authors, edited by Melissa Marr and Kelley Armstrong.

Short stories, yeah, I know. They get a bad rap because, well, they're short. But if that's a problem for you, Enthralled is different. Many of these short stories take place in worlds the authors have built in book series. In fact, I had my suspicions that some of the stories weren't standalones when I was reading at the beginning, but I knew it before I even looked up the authors' other books because I recognized characters from a young adult novel I'd read. So, if there's a story in this anthology that you really like, you can just look up the author and read more. You might even find a few new authors to try that you haven't before. And that's what this book is about for the authors, at least. It's a promotional tool, designed to spark your interest.

What I like about short stories is that they don't waste time. They have to get you interested immediately without a lot of set-up. They have to end quickly without a lot of time for frivolous details or drawn out romantic scenes. Romance is great, but paranormal romance tends to go off the deep end a lot of the time. There's only so many ways you can write about it, so many creatures you can use or make up. Have you been to a bookstore lately? What stands out first? That young adult section with covers of beautiful boys and girls, sometimes half naked, often with fangs or wings or colored smoke around them. You know what I'm talking about. Huge. Teen. Phenomenon.

Enthralled isn't about paranormal romance. When I picked it up, I thought it was, and I was more interested, at the time, in seeing if a book of young adult short stories could go off. The theme of the book, which holds all the stories together, is Journeys. In some way, each new set of characters has a journey to take. Often, to my surprise, the characters were siblings rather than romantic interests, though there were a few of those, too, the weaker stories, in my opinion.

Now, down to the nitpicking. The first half of the book is fascinating. Each new story is so different and not what I expected. In the latter half of the book, there are a far too many vampires and a few more romances. Plus, by then, I think I was getting tired of "starting over" with each new story, having to get into a whole new set of characters. Also, some of the stories were clearly from bigger worlds that the authors had written in other books. Part of that was cool. I liked having the sense that there was a bigger story, but sometimes, the short story didn't really have a satisfactory end. I guess that's where the promotional aspect of the book comes in. Like the story...buy the author's whole book. Great for the authors. Annoying for the readers unless you're looking for a bigger world to submerge in.

The theme of Journeys could have gotten old by story sixteen or even by story three, but it didn't. Each author approaches the subject very differently, and though a few road trips are actually taken in the stories, the paranormal aspect of it, in this case, is a plus, keeping the stories quite different from each other. The subtitle, Paranormal Diversions, describes this book perfectly. The title, Enthralled, not so much. I don't get it. Is the reader supposed to be enthralled? Are the characters enthralled with their own superhuman powers? Is anything paranormal supposed to be enthralling, simply because of what it is? I enjoyed the book, but I was hardly enthralled.

Three stars. If you are into paranormal teen fiction, check out this book to find new authors to read. The authors, alphabetically, are Kelley Armstrong, Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Sarah Rees Brennan, Rachel Caine, Ally Condie, Kimberly Derting, Kami Garcia, Claudia Gray, Melissa Marr, Jackson Pearce, Mary E. Pearson, Carrie Ryan, Jeri Smith-Ready, Margaret Stohl, Jessica Verday, and Rachel Vincent.

From My Own Pen: The Day After

Here's another self-published book I contributed to this year. It just became available to the public this month.

The Day After is a short story collection with a broad focus spanning several genres: spy comedy, science fiction, zombie horror, and gothic horror. Essentially, each story has something to do with "the day after." In this particular collection, two of the stories are fairly dark in theme, one is dark but told more comedically, and one is pure lighthearted fun. The latter is mine, a spy comedy that stretched my storytelling skills beyond my comfort zone in some ways but was totally me in other ways, and when I say "totally me," I mean that if you took out the spy and hotel job parts, you'd basically have my life.

This book is a promotional tool for me, my husband Nick, and our friends: Nathan Marchand and Keith Osmun. It's a sampler of our work, and it's meant to draw an audience to our various websites and projects. The print version is available for $6.99 at www.lulu.com, and the ebook is just $1.99 on www.smashwords.com.

And now, the back cover copy, to whet your appetite:

Natalya is an American mom and wife with a Russian name working as a spy for the Brazilian government in a Midwest American town. Balancing dual identities is dangerous–and sometimes comical–especially when her husband hasn’t a clue.

Morana is on a suicide mission to transmit a bestial virus to her enemies when she encounters a smalltown family with the potential to break through her boundaries of hatred. But in the end, will it make a difference, or is it too late for redemption?

Peter, a photojournalist, returns home late to meet his newborn son…but just in time to rescue his family from a national zombie infestation. As they travel toward safer ground, trying to maintain a modicum of normalcy, Peter has the urge to document the disaster, but at what price?

Jacob is trapped in an endless maze of a house that appears to have no exits to the outside world except for a noose in his bedroom. He meets a mysterious stranger in the darkness and discovers pieces of letters he doesn’t remember writing. Who knows how long he’s been there? The noose is tightening.

Four stories, four writers, four genres…one connecting thread. What happens when the main focus of your life is stripped away and all that’s left is the day after?

The Kissing Game: Short Stories

I don't normally pick up short story collections. As a writer, I think it's fun to write and collect my own short stories, but personally, I'd rather read a longer story I can get invested in. But my husband has collected some of his short stories into a self-published book, and he's in the process of gathering a few short stories from friends to make an e-book. And I did once read a short story collection on vampires. So, for whatever reason, I picked up The Kissing Game, by Aidan Chambers. He's an older British fellow who's won several awards, and the back cover copy promised some surprises in the stories.

The stories are undoubtedly well-written, but I didn't like most of the endings. More particularly, I didn't think many of the stories had endings. Chambers himself admits these stories are flash fictions, a somewhat newly popular branch of story that my husband loves and has become adept at writing. With flash fiction, there's no time to develop character. You just need a central idea and a plot that is bigger than itself. In other words, you need to write it in such a way that the reader can infer much of the plot. Many flash fictions have surprise endings, but it isn't necessary. Some of Chambers's stories have surprise endings, and those were probably the most satisfactory to me, even if I didn't particularly like the stories themselves.

The title story was one of the best although the ending is sad; what saves it is the surprising shock value at the end. There was another story I found interesting about a boy with agoraphobia who tries to rescue a Russian girl in the slave trade. I'm just not sure it was a young adult story in a collection of stories for young adults. In fact, readers should be aware that although there is no gratuitous sex or graphicness, many of the stories contain references to casual sexuality, which I did not appreciate. In one, the surprise ending is that the narrator is a girl, and a lesbian at that. She talks about her former girlfriend's new boyfriend the whole story. I simply don't appreciate the emphasis on sexuality in the stories.

Other stories didn't work at all for me. Some were written purely in dialog, talking about nothing of substance that I could tell. They seemed like exercises in writing rather than final pieces. Chambers says that in flash fiction, sometimes the reader has to work as hard as the writer to discover the meaning behind a piece. I think that's kind of interesting, but there has to be some meaning to work with in the first place.

So, I give The Kissing Game: Short Stories only two stars. Unless you are doing research for your own book of short stories, skip this one.