Anthologies—particularly those traveling in the genre fiction sector of the literary universe—often require an angle: A collection of the best stories featuring time-traveling dinosaurs. A book full of tales about carnivorous unicorns. An anthology of science fiction detectives. And on and on. Having an angle for an anthology makes perfect sense, but it doesn’t always yield quality or diverse results. In fact, diversity in an anthology might be counterintuitive to the curation.
With Shadow Show, the new anthology edited by Sam Weller and Mort Castle, the curation seems fairly light. All they did was ask the contributors to write a story in honor of Ray Bradbury. The result is a unique anthology containing tons of diversity, high quality stories, and yet adheres to its theme. Best of all, the majority of the stories aren’t hammy love letters to Bradbury’s style, but instead, awesome short works that stand on their own.
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