Peter Crowther (1) (1949–)

This was a collection of smart, efficient stories. As I read these crime/mystery/supernatural entries, the projector in my head played them in a smoky, black and white reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard, Dial M For Murder, Laura, Double Indemnity -- I could keep that list going on and on.

I had a hard time with this collection and it took me much longer to read it than it should have. Now you may think, uh oh, it was bad. Nope. Just the opposite. When I get anxious while reading a book, I have show more to put it down and walk away. That surge of anxiety is not enjoyable. Yet, for a story to elicit that intense response from me means the author is doing his job. He fulfilled his objective of ratcheting up the tension and suspense to the point I had to distance myself from them, while skillfully manipulating me to maintain that equilibrium between anxiety and curiosity so I would keep coming back.

Some of you may think starting and stopping and starting again ruins the story -- interrups the flow and tension. For some, that could be the kiss of death for the book. For me? No.

Maybe if I put it to you in these terms, you will understand me. I guess it could weirdly be compared to sex. Getting right there and then backing off before the payoff. Yeah, that's right. I went there. So, reading a book where I do this little dance makes the payoff -- sweeter.

Yes Pete Crowther, you can thank me for that comparison. At least I hope if you happen to see this someday, you will take that as a compliment.

A story in the collection, Tomorrow Eyes, reminded me very much of one of my favorite books: Bradbury's, The Illustrated Man. This is a very different story, but similar. And I bonded immediately with the author when he mentioned in his short, Keepsakes, Vivaldi, The Four Seasons and Alan Alda -- one of my most beloved, unsung ensemble movies.

So, good collection. Sharp writing. Interesting concepts. I would recommend it. show less

Hoo boy! This is a good one! Haven't read anything similar in years! I'm not talking about subject matter though, I'm talking about writing style. LOVED it. I've never read anything by Peter Crowther before and if I'm honest I've never even heard of him before this boook caught my attention but right from the very first page of the prologue I felt like I was meeting an old friend after a long absence.

Why? How? Because it's like this guy is channelling my coming of age book hero, Stephen 'The show more Man' King! It's uncanny!

They both have this 'way' of writing. It's like the books are written in a first person POV but with a third person narrative. I can't explain it, I'm positive there must be a term to describe that writing style but I just don't know what it is. There are a lot of inner monologues where someone will be describing how they're feeling or what they're thinking but they use words like 'he' or 'she' to describe themselves insead of 'I'.

Ack! I just can't put it into words...all I know is that I associate it with King and I like it.

So anyway, the book...

Darkness Falling is the first part of the Forever Twilight trilogy. I think it's considered to be Science Fiction but it's also probably easily slotted into the Horror genre. Maybe Apocalyptic fiction too. To keep with the King connection I'd compare it to having a bit of 'The Langoliers', 'The Stand', 'The Tommy Knockers'..actually, I could probably find a lot of bits from a lot of novels to compare this to. It's quite hard to pigeon hole. Invasion of the body snatchers with zombie aliens is kinda close.

It's very character driven and the whole story is told via multiple 'survivors' and while I love all that, it was a bit frustrating to get caught up in one person's story only to have the chapter end and have to remind myself of a new person's story-to-date and catch up with their portion again for the new chapter. I'll admit to enjoying the story of some characters more than others too, which made things all the more frustrating when a really good bit ended and I had to get through a character I wasn't enjoying as much to get back to the good stuff. It's all good, I just really wasn't that 'connected' to the radio station guys (and gal), which is a pity because they're sort of central.

There a LOT of 'name dropping scattered throughout. Pop culture, movie references, actors, etc and it's not that it bothered me exactly it just got tedious after a while. There's a section where one of the characters 'Ronnie' tells the character 'Karl' that he looks like the actor Paul Giamatti, now while that's great for me to get a visual of how Karl looks it felt like lazy writing. There's that mantra for writers that I've seen mentioned here and there, "Don't 'tell' me, 'show' me" but here 'showing' me involved a side-step to google images to find out what Karl looked like. In case anyone is as un-savvy as I am, he's the one who played the Ourangatang in Planet of the Apes.... I think.

Did I mention how scary it is yet? No? Well, it's scary. I had to stop reading it last night and lay it aside to finish today during daylight hours. I'm not a huge devourer of the horror genre and don't claim to be an authority on what constitutes a successful scare but all I know is that when reading certain bits my brain was saying "No no no no no...omgomgomgomg". I think I'm probably quite wimpy as far as 'easily spooked' goes but to coin a Disney rating, it's worse than "mild peril".

I found it hard to find any kind of in-depth synopsis for this book and I don't know if that's intentional but just in case it is I won't spoil anything by going into a deep analysis of the story line. I'll just end by saying - I. LIKED. IT! show less

One of my favorite reading pleasures is the short story collection. Such books provide a nearly perfect combination of diversity and readability within a single volume. This is especially true when the collection consists of stories from multiple authors and their different styles of writing.

And yet short story collections cause me enormous annoyance, because I never finish them. When I pick up one, I start to read it by choosing stories based on the length of the story, or the premise, or show more (in the case of the multi-authored collections) because I've enjoyed the author's previous works. Then, as the days and weeks pass, I find myself down to those two or three stories that I haven't read which I have to practically force myself to read. These become "to-do" projects that force me to leave the book out, yet the longer the book is out the more I pick it up to revisit the ones I've enjoyed rather than finish those last couple so I can be done with the collection.

This is why it took me four months to read the thirteen selections in Peter Crowther's anthology of time travel short stories. It shouldn't have taken anywhere near as long, especially as I had read five of them in other collections long before I came across this one on the shelf of a used bookstore. I read most of the others in a matter of days, but as I came down to those last two or three I put the book aside and spent the next couple of months reading other works. It took a conscious commitment to finish, coupled with a determination not to skim, that allowed me to regard the book as done.

This shouldn't be regarded as a judgment on the stories themselves. Like most other short story collections, they're a mix of the great, the good, and the disappointing. What makes this one enjoyable were the ways in which Crowther stretched the concept of time travel to consider aspects of it different from the standard "man goes into the past/future" premise. The ones in this collection are:

"The Very Slow Time Machine" by Ian Watson. Of the ones I hadn't read before, this was the story I was most looking forward to reading, as it's an incredibly well-regarded book. It has a fantastic premise and some interesting considerations of the effects of time travel, though there are parts of it that I'm still trying to process.

"The Love Letter" by Jack Finney. Finney is best known for his novels which present time travel as a way of accessing a romanticized past. This story is very much in that vein, with a businessman in 1962 Brooklyn engaging in a correspondence with a woman living in the Gilded Age. Like his other works, it was overtly sentimental and saccharine for me, but it wasn't without it's charm

"On the Watchtower at Plaeta" by Garry Kilworth. In this one, a trio of time travelers from a dystopic America find themselves in a standoff in ancient Greece with another group of time travelers — only the second group come from the past. It's a novel concept, but the story itself doesn't really do much with it.

"The Twonky" by Lewis Padgett. This is one of the classics that I read before, about a domineering futuristic device being introduced into the home of a 1940s couple. Reading it gave me the opportunity to enjoy it all over again.

"The New Accelerator" by H. G. Wells. As much of a fan of Wells as I am, I wasn't aware of this story of two men testing out a new invention which speeds up people relative to the world around them. It was interesting and fun.

"Man in his Time" by Brian W. Aldiss. Another novel take on the time travel concept, this one has a woman coping with the transformation of her astronaut husband after his return from Mars, as his trip there has left him 3.3077 minutes ahead of the people around him. It's a great premise, though I kept questioning some of the implications of it that Aldiss posits.

"—And Subsequent Construction" by Spider Robinson. I liked many of Robinson's Callahan's Crosstime Saloon series, but this stand-alone story about a stardrive engineer encountering her future self was too focused on being clever and not enough on telling a story.

"Timeskip" by Charles de Lint. Like Finney's "The Love Letter," de Lint's story is premised in a connection with a romanticized past, though whereas Finney's tale can be cloying de Lint's has an element of sadness that made for a nice contrast.

"A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury. This is by far the most famous of the stories in the anthology and for good reason, even if the movie based on it was utter garbage.

"What We Learned From This Morning's Newspaper" by Robert Silverberg. I've been a huge fan of Silverberg's short stories for nearly as long as I can remember — among the first sci-fi books I read was a collection of his "greatest" stories — yet this one was unknown to me until I saw it in the book. And like most of Silverberg's work, I enjoyed reading his tale about how a group of suburban families react when one morning copies of the New York Times from next week show up on their front lawns.

"Jeffty is Five" by Harlan Ellison. This is one of Ellison's finest works, another story about nostalgia and our connection to the past, one that ends in heartbreak as nostalgia so often does.

"The Isolinguals" by L. Sprague de Camp. In this one, a group of nefarious individuals create chaos with a machine that causes the consciousness of random ancestors to take over their descendants' bodies. Like his classic time travel novel Lest Darkness Fall, Sprague enjoys himself by having a little fun with the tale.

"The Man Who Walked Home" by James Tiptree Jr. Centuries after the world's first chrononaut unintentionally triggered World War III, a group of people gather to celebrate his annual appearance as he travels back to the past. Like most of Sheldon's stores, I had to read it multiple times to appreciate its greatness.

If you're wondering which ones were the "projects" that kept me from finishing the collection, I'll leave it for you to figure out. I am glad, though, that none of them kept me from enjoying the ones I liked best, which is yet another reason why I like short story collections so much. show less

Ever since I started wanting to be a professional SF writer, I'd been reading The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, one of the standards of the industry. But when I received a copy of the Postscripts anthology, a sort of FSF across the pond, I was taken aback.

Where has this publication been all my life?

In recent days, the stories featured in FSF have been lackluster, leading eventually to my ceasing procuring copies (though still sending them submissions, in a hope to liven up things show more for them). Postscripts, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air to those who are sick of the stagnant breath of stories about robots, by robots, and for robots, as well as pseudo-avant-garde stories that are more accurately described as "lazy-author-didn't-want-to-write-an-ending."

But, I digress. Postscripts is amazing, and this being a PS issue, it, too, is amazing. The run-down:

Balfour and Meriwether in The Adventure of the Emperor's Vengeance by Daniel Abraham

This is a steampunk story that involves quite an alternate history of Egypt, and the secret order of Jews sworn to protect against what happened in Cairo. I'm not sure if it's part of a larger series, but it could very well be such. Balfour and Meriwether bring to mind a Victorian-era Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. (4/5)

The Famous Cave Paintings on Isolus 9 by Chris Beckett

I wasn't big on this tale, about an adventuring travel writer of an uncle in the future who likes to take stabs at present-day organized religion, both directly and metaphorically. In the end, the story felt like it was written just to down-talk said religion(s), and felt quite empty aside from that. (3/5)

The Portrayed Man by Justin Cartaginese

Cartaginese has proven that Gaiman is not the only writer capable of writing believable, yet bizarre stories about neighboring worlds and a duo of strange gentlemen who bridge it with less-than-admirable intentions. As such, our hero in this story is uninterested in life, and as such, gets a body double to take care of his job, his relationship, and pretty much his entire life. The double does it just like he would, only better. (4/5)

A Life Clichéd by David N. Drake

If I'm not mistaken, this is Drake's first piece of published fiction. At least, it's the first I've found recorded. It's essentially a two-page joke, but funny, nonetheless. (3.5/5)

The World Breaks by Scott Edelman

The World Breaks is a dark epistolary in which some unknown event happens, sending the world into chaos. A small midwesternish town doesn't want to evacuate their precious home, and as such stands up to authority. Each letter is written as a "If you're reading this, I'm dead," sort of letter. I'm not sure what to take away from the fact that I was reading them. (3.5/5)

The Warlock and the Man of the World by M. K. Hobson

Some authors write Steampunk, which takes place in a 19th century-style world that has achieved an industrial revolution. Hobson, though, has taken the same era, only shifted hemispheres and replaces steaming with demons. Warlock is a wild-west story about a town inhabited by men and demons alike. When there's a demon murder, a warlock (who presides over demonic affairs) and a lawyer/minister (who presides over human affairs) must determine the guilt and punishment of the murderer. But she's a little more than meets the eye. Hobson has written or will write more in this world, which is a rather interesting take on the old west style of writing. (4/5)

Bigger than the Beetles by Andrew Hook

A story set in Japan with toy frogs that expand in water. Not a literary masterpiece, but otherwise enjoyable. (3.5/5)

Enemy of the Good by Matthew Hughes

Set in Hughes' Old Earth universe (is there anything of his that isn't?), in which professional thief and troublemaker Luff Imbry is stranded in the middle of nowhere, and must deal with the demands of an ascetic religious order, during which he meets the perfect Imbry, who attempts to challenge his self worth. I like Hughes' stories, as they are complex and witty, and do a nice job of holistically connecting the aspects of the story in the end, leaving you satiated with one tale, but later craving another. (4.5/5)

Meeting Mr Tony by Tim Lees

This story is part of a larger series involving a Doctor Who-ish uncle who tries to use science and reason to solve all of his problems, including his desire to spend less time with his wife. In the midst of discovering a way to move through space without actually moving through space, he also discovers his wife is falling in love with the man he set her up with. But, is he not human? If you chop him with an axe, does he not bleed? Find out... (4/5)

Famous People by Ron Savage

This story didn't really have too much of an SFF element to it, other than a mother of a character whose diary another character of the story is reading having the ability to "breathe life" into stillborn children. It's a realistic tale, though, about celebrity and the cost thereof. (3/5)

The Cacto Skeleton by David T. Wilbanks

A reminder to take your meds! Otherwise, you'll have to chase down that skeleton that was once buried in your yard. (3.5/5)

The Red King's Sleep by Marly Youmans

Inspired by a dream, and reads like a dream. Like Finnegans Wake Lite, as written by a fantasy author. (3/5)

Best in Show: Enemy of the Good - The more I read of Mr. Hughes, the more I like his stuff. show less