Order THE FIRST SHORT STORY COLLECTION here
I like to kill people.
It's important to admit the truth to yourself, even if you lie to others, and I do a lot of lying in my line of work. Inside my heads, I try to keep the truth black and white, no grey area: I like to kill. I love to kill, people.
Wrapping up your best early short stories in one volume and putting it up for sale on the Kindle Store has become somewhat of a common practice in this day and age. Authors use their own fiction as a business card if you will, as well as a way to lasso in a few dollars for their hard work. I have yet to see statistics about the efficiency of this method, but there are a few success stories and it sure changes from the old school query letter. Anonymous-9 already had everybody's attention before publishing THE 1ST SHORT STORY COLLECTION. So its publication struck me as a pretty efficient way to fan the fire and make her stories of interest all available in one place. Read it was my first experience of Anonymous-9 fiction and I totally get what the buzz is about. There is something genuine going on here.
If Anonymous-9 won awards for her short fiction and got so much hype, there is one story in particular responsible for that: HARD BITE, which would later spawn an entire novel. The narrator is wheelchair bound due to a terrifying, gruesome car accident that left him mangled and with a huge chip on his shoulder. Armed with a killer service monkey sidekick, he becomes the crippled prowler and seeks revenge on reckless drivers. HARD BITE is a standout story. One of the best I've read on the net, entirely deserving of the awards it won. The paranoid hyppereality in which the narrator lives, everything is a potential threat and yet, everything can be turned into a weapon too. Anonymous-9 syncopated, manic style serves the story very well. I don't think Philip K. Dick could have written this idea better, if he had been into crime fiction. HARD BITE is worth the asking price for THE 1ST SHORT STORY COLLECTION alone.
Other stories that stood out to me were TEQUILA SPIKE, EATING THE DEFICIT and M-N.S. They are the three stories that crank the trademark hyperreality of Anonymous-9 to the maximum it can possibly bear without turning into bizarro fiction. TEQUILA SPIKE uses it in a dead serious narrative, about an abusive family entering a abusive relationship with a store clerk. EATING THE DEFICIT is one of several flash stories in the collection and it's the one that works best due to its sheer recklessness. It's a little predictable, but it makes its point so strongly, it still is a lot of fun. There is quite a few layers of political content to peel off that one. M-N-S is the other story that's far ahead of the group, along with HARD BITE. It's not as good, but it's way ahead of most stories you will find online. Both funny and disturbing and far off whatever you might expect from a short.
A moment later, a smartly dressed lady rushed in.
"Governor, it's urgent." she hissed. "Cannibalism has broken out. It's not limited to the consumption of unwanted children anymore."
The governor stuck a finger in his ear and waggled about it. "I don't think I heard you," he said, as a man wearing a ragged suit rushed by the door, gnawing on a severed arm. "That's what I'm trying to tell you, sir. It's an outbreak."
Not all the stories are successful, though. Fortunately for the reader, the longest ones are usually the best. The problem is the same for most. They are flash pieces (a thousand words of less) and the premise is too complex for a flash, so the story doesn't have the breathing room to surprise the reader or to go deeper into its themes. It did not really bother me overall, because it's just not every writer that can pace something that will stand out is such few words. Some thrive in concentrated form and some thrive on distance and complexity. The longer Anonymous-9's stories run, the better they are. This is quite exciting, knowing she has a full-length HARD BITE novel out.
Another use of Kindle Store short story collections for writers is to help them figure things out. Poke the market, find their readers and see what works and what doesn't. Not every story works in THE 1ST SHORT STORY COLLECTION, but it's short enough to highlight the good stories and to keep your reeling while reading the shorter, less memorable ones. It's both a scientific beacon and tremendous object of entertainment. Its most important use is that it gives you easy access to HARD BITE, which is a story and also an universe so fascinating, you can't turn away from it. Anonymous-9 is a force to be reckoned with, whenever she is unrestrained by a word count, proving once again my theory that when women tackle crime fiction, they often do it better than men. THE 1ST SHORT STORY COLLECTION is a quick, fun read, perfect for a long day in public transportation or for an airport layover. It's more of an appetizer than a full meal, but it did its job as now I want more.
THREE STARS