New Jersey Noir (Akashic Noir)

Overall quite unremarkable, with rather disappointing poetry and stories that only achieved importance through an upsettingly humanistic bleakness. Some of the stories held promise - "The Enigma of Grover's Mill", by Bradford Morrow, with an interesting take on insanity and Orson Wells' broadcast of "The War of the Worlds", or Jonathan Safran Foer's "Too Near Real", which contained the brilliant line "We are happy with the fake, and happy with the real, but the near real - the too near real - unnerves us." - but for the most part, none of them lived up to their potential, either feeling stretched thin or merely incomplete.

The sole exception, and indeed the sole reason to read any part of this volume, was the brilliant "New Day Newark" by S.J. Rozan, which features the trope of an awesome little old lady taking matters into her own hands, and using a sharp tongue and clever wit to engineer the fall of two drug gangs who threaten her neighborhood. Incidentally, that's on pages 61-75; go find it in the library, read that story, and put it back on the shelf. ( )