Death's Excellent Vacation (#19) is an anthology of "Paranormal R & R" short stories edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L.P. Kelner. All of stories in this collection are new, by a number of noted sci-fi, fantasy & horror writers: Charlaine Harris (the Sookie Stackhouse series), Katie MacAlister, Jeaniene Frost, Jeff Abbott and Lilith Saintcrow among them.
I'm not generally a fan of short stories, but I did enjoy this collection which is more on the light side than the "hide under the covers and don't turn off the lights" category. I particularly enjoyed Katie MacAlister's The Perils of Effrijim about a sixth class demon who is a victim of a plot, and Toni L.P. Kelner's Pirate Dave's Haunted Amusement Park whose subject you can pretty much guess from the title. Lilith Saintcrow's The Heart Is Always Right about a love-struck gargoyle was a sweet tale of sacrifice and virtue rewarded.
My husband is like me - he's not really a short story fan, either. If he picks up a collection like this, he tends to pick and choose his favorite authors from the anthologies and will sample, but rarely read all of the stories (He's left Warriors for me to read which contains some of my favorite authors, but we probably won't read the same stories from it, for example). It surprised me that he picked this book up at all but especially when he admitted that he read every single story in this collection. He knows I read Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse books, but hate the HBO True Blood series (The series just doesn't match the mental pictures I have.). He had nothing to read on hand so was willing to read a vampire tale, but got hooked on the stories in Death's Excellent Vacation. That's two thumbs up from this household!
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