Book reviews

Book review: Dark Delicacies III: Haunted

Despite the subtitle, Dark Delicacies III: Haunted is not really a collection of ghost stories, though many play on the theme of ghosts or some kind of haunting.

Perhaps its most bizarre inclusion is a foreward by Steven Weber. Yes, the guy from Wings.

As is often the case with collections there are a few standouts, some clunkers and a lot of perfectly serviceable reads to be found. Most of the stories are quite short at ten pages or thereabouts so even the bad ones won’t linger. As befits a horror collection a few stories are built on gross-outs and some fairly graphic sex. Be warned, ye of delicate sensibilities!

My favorites include Richard Matheson’s cheeky “How to Edit”, which has a kind of companion piece in the ultimately nonsensical “Tyler’s Third Act”, both stories dealing with self-mutilation. The latter falls apart at the end (no pun intended), while Matheson’s wraps up appropriately. David Morrell’s “The Architecture of Snow” rounds out the book (save for a very brief poem by Clive Barker) and is a wonderfully meditative piece. “Man with the Canvas Bag” by Gary Braunbeck is weirdly wonderful while Chuck Palahinuk’s “Fetch” is just plain weird, kind of what you would expect if Jack Handey wrote a horror story. Funny, though.

“Food of the Gods” left me cold and not just because it’s one of several stories in the collection to use the ‘haha, even though the story is written in first person the narrator is DEAD, fooled you!” shtick. “The Slow Haunting”, though well-written, is flattened by a twist ending that isn’t earned.

Overall, though, any fan of horror should find enough here to warrant a look. I give Dark Delicacies III: Haunted 3.5 out of 5 severed heads.

Book review: Cosm

Cosm is a 1998 SF novel by Gregory Benford. I’ve read and enjoyed several other of his novels, including Great Sky River and Timescape. The concept of Cosm intrigued me but when I first picked it up years ago I only got about ten pages in before abandoning it because it’s one of those books that doesn’t jump right into the main plot right away. In fact, the beginning is rather boring.

This year I picked it up again and finished it and I’m left with a feeling of indifference. Cosm is not a bad book but it is perhaps a badly told story. The premise is neat — an accident with a super-collider leads to the creation of a small sphere, the titular cosm. The cosm provides a literal window to a miniature universe growing at an exponentially accelerated rate within it.

The protagonist of the story is a stubborn, abrasive black physicist with an inept social life named Alica Butterworth. After the accident, she claims ownership of the cosm and returns with it to the University of California Irvine where she teaches and researches. The novel follows both the politics surrounding ownership and treatment of the cosm as well as her research into it. The problem is that most of the story focuses on the politics, with rival universities, the government, religious groups and others weighing in on the matter, while the actual study of the phenomenon is handled in a bland, perfunctory manner, as if it’s just another research project to write papers on.

Cosm ends up as more a look into the battles professors face at educational institutions and less a look at a potentially world-changing experiment. As such, it proves to be a disappointment. It does pull off the neat trick of ending with both a bang and a whimper, though. Benford completists may want to check it out but there are better SF novels out there.