Soul Survivors-Hometown Tales

edited by Shawn M. Riddle and David Naughton Shires

A short story collection that shows just how the world ends.

This is an anthology that features many talented writers.  Each of them presents a different look at what an apocalypse appears as.  "Soul Survivors-Hometown Tales" has most every conceivable "end of the world' scenario that one can imagine.  It has demons, werewolves and the ever popular zombies contained within its pages.  A cornucopia of world ending scenarios featured in this anthology.


There are a few stand-out stories among this collection. "Piano Man" by Kaye Sarah Inglis is  among that number.  That one was a surreal and hallucinatory yarn about a man who hides under a grand piano during a werewolf siege.  It was out of the ordinary and one doesn't normally expect werewolves to be a focus of an apocalypse. I liked that this one had novel (pun intended) approach to the apocalyptic genre. The characters' giddy insanity made the story though and  adding another dreamlike layer to the story.  "Birthday Wish"  was a deeply moving story about a man and his son trying to survive in a zombie filled world. Theresa Derwin's "End of Knights" featuring Templar Knights and a female one was a definite surprise.  It was one  that featured demons and the holy grail was one that showed an original storyline.  "Mass Destruction" by Rebecca Besser also told a story about an alien invasion and a lone woman evading the alien made devastation around her.  It had another well made character in a tenacious woman looking for her family.  "White Rabbits and Clowns, Oh My!"  was by far the most quirky tale of them all. Imagine rabbits and killer clowns going around killing everyone.  It wasn't hard to visualize it in this tale.  Clowns are generally creepy and this one just heaped on another reason to shy away from them.

The stories that each of these writers offer are well written and very creative.  All of them entertain and keep interest going in them. In short story collections there isn't much space to develop deep characters and highly descriptive story lines.  "Soul Survivors-Hometown Tales" is an exception to them. They all were very exciting to read and all of them had a very rapid pace with excellent characters.