I think I was anticipating a little more horror to this 17-story anthology. However, that being said, I actually really enjoyed the speculative nature of the stories and was able to enjoy the various genres used in each story. Some of my favorites are:

“The Dreamist” – a man who can record his own dreams and uses them to basically show as movies, as a different type of art. His dreams tend to feature a certain woman, who he doesn’t know, but who is always in his dreams. Turns out her presence may have a darker meaning than he realizes.

“Mentor” – about an aspiring poet who is obsessed with getting the approval of his mentor. The mentor’s secret about his phenomenal work is discovered by the aspiring young man. This felt like the most horror story in this collection and I really loved it! Dark and disturbing.

“My Father’s Friend” – a compelling and emotional story about time travel.

“And the Raindrops – Its Tears” – very weird and very speculative and much more ‘spiritual’ that I usually like in my stories. But it was such a good story where people are unable to look up into the sky or they will see the face of a Demon and will be cursed.

All in all, a well done collection of stories that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys speculative fiction.

ARC via Netgalley

Some stories stand above the others. All stories seem to fit in a horror/suspense category of sci-fi and includes some interesting premises. This has a similar feel to Black Mirror, with dark and interesting sci-fi concepts.

This wasn't necessarily 'bad' I guess, it just wasn't something I enjoyed. It was technically well written but I was just bored by the whole thing. There were a few stories that I found somewhat interesting but I think maybe only in comparison to the rest of the collection. Actually I think I'm putting myself on a ban from requesting any more anthologies because they just have not been working out for me lately.

Anyway the stories in this collection were just all over the place to me. I guess they could mostly be described as 'horror' just to make it easier, but there didn't seem to be any unifying theme and I didn't even find most of them that disturbing. Also on NetGalley this was shelved under LGBTIA and SFF and I would NOT recommend it for anyone who was specifically looking for LGBTIA stuff because the only stories that fit under that category are a story about teenagers at a conversion therapy facility and then a story about Oscar Wilde that I didn't even really read because it was the last one and I just wanted to be done with this. I think that was the most disappointing part of the whole thing to me and probably a lesson on picking your genres more closely. This would have fit much better under Horror [and SFF] and I can't help but think it was possibly just stuck under LGBTIA to get more readers.