Gary Phillips (1) (1955–)

With everything going on in the world right now I have had trouble focusing on any kind of non-fiction. Sometimes you need a couple hundred pages of pulp. I'll probably forget 80% of this book within a week, but it passed the time!

Personally, the stories felt too similar to be very enjoyable for me -- the settings varied from far-futures to the early 1900s, with a variety of fantasy and sci-fi elements, but the characters, plots, and story structures didn't vary much. The characters and plots (when there were plots) were thin, with a greater focus on the action, which was decent, though the writing was occasionally clunky, but, again, fairly same-y.

As with so many collections of short stories, this was a mixed bag. There were some that I loved, and some that bored me. Overall, I would rank it as being an okay read.

This was a fun collection of short stories ranging a variety of pulp genres (superheroes, spies, magic, demons, scifi). Phillips borrows liberally from 20th century pulp stories and adds a unique twist, especially from a BIPOC perspective. Take these stories for what they are: a hodgepodge of crazy stories that are always moving forward. It's like turning on your favorite UHF channel at 2am and catching an anthology show or a B-movie.