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creepysnowman's review
4.0
First off, it has to be said... $1.50 for over four hundred pages of entertainment? That's just insane value right there.
Action: Pulse Pounding Tales, Vol. 1 from editor Matt Hilton, best known as the author of the Joe Hunter series of action novels brings together 37 short stories of action and adventure.
These tales are all bound together with the unapologetic tradition of drugstore book rack pulp - and they deliver exactly what the reader expects. Bad guys with guns are hunted down and given their just deserts by even badder anti-heroes with even bigger guns.
That's not at all to say that you won't be surprised and transported by the stories and the characters - only that "entertainment" is the watchword here, and it is delivered in a 428 page bucket.
Some particular standouts are "Strangers on a Train", by Stephen Leather in which a band of "Hard Boys" from London meet their match when they pick the wrong subway car to rob. For pure, gritty revenge fantasy, "Gallance" by Col Bury is possibly the best example among several choices in "Action"; and Adrian Magson's "Jingle Bells" brings an unexpected and very welcome dose of heart to the mix.
Just as the "lone wolf with an agenda" (be they cops/agents or soldiers of fortune) begins to get a little thin, the second half of the book kicks in, and presents stories of Swords and Sorcery, like the excellent "Issa's Island Prison" by Graham Smith, and the rollicking pirate tale, "The Judgement of Jean Lafitte" by Evan Lewis.
The collection finishes off with a bang, collecting a group of stories under the subtitle "The Grittier Side", where everything that has gone before gets ratcheted up to another degree, and the violence and misery are elevated to a point that some may find uncomfortable, but that others may find the best in the book. Richard Godwin's "Savage Sun" is a prime example of this principle, playing with the idea of how much revenge is just too much.
All is not perfect in this collection, however. Sometimes, in smaller, self-published anthologies, the editor needs to rely on the writer doing a lot of their own "clean up" work; and there are a few of the shorter stories where typos and homonym errors add up to some unwelcome distraction.
Among 37 stories, however, I can say that there are only about four or five that didn't grab my attention, and of those, there are just three that may have been better left out. (One story was a write-off as my Kindle (on Android) chopped up the letters and every third line was blanked out, so that one is no fault to the writer!)
I'll end the way I began- at $1.50 for over 420 pages of some of the most fun, action-packed, entertaining stories you're likely to read this year, this should be your next Kindle read!
Action: Pulse Pounding Tales, Vol. 1 from editor Matt Hilton, best known as the author of the Joe Hunter series of action novels brings together 37 short stories of action and adventure.
These tales are all bound together with the unapologetic tradition of drugstore book rack pulp - and they deliver exactly what the reader expects. Bad guys with guns are hunted down and given their just deserts by even badder anti-heroes with even bigger guns.
That's not at all to say that you won't be surprised and transported by the stories and the characters - only that "entertainment" is the watchword here, and it is delivered in a 428 page bucket.
Some particular standouts are "Strangers on a Train", by Stephen Leather in which a band of "Hard Boys" from London meet their match when they pick the wrong subway car to rob. For pure, gritty revenge fantasy, "Gallance" by Col Bury is possibly the best example among several choices in "Action"; and Adrian Magson's "Jingle Bells" brings an unexpected and very welcome dose of heart to the mix.
Just as the "lone wolf with an agenda" (be they cops/agents or soldiers of fortune) begins to get a little thin, the second half of the book kicks in, and presents stories of Swords and Sorcery, like the excellent "Issa's Island Prison" by Graham Smith, and the rollicking pirate tale, "The Judgement of Jean Lafitte" by Evan Lewis.
The collection finishes off with a bang, collecting a group of stories under the subtitle "The Grittier Side", where everything that has gone before gets ratcheted up to another degree, and the violence and misery are elevated to a point that some may find uncomfortable, but that others may find the best in the book. Richard Godwin's "Savage Sun" is a prime example of this principle, playing with the idea of how much revenge is just too much.
All is not perfect in this collection, however. Sometimes, in smaller, self-published anthologies, the editor needs to rely on the writer doing a lot of their own "clean up" work; and there are a few of the shorter stories where typos and homonym errors add up to some unwelcome distraction.
Among 37 stories, however, I can say that there are only about four or five that didn't grab my attention, and of those, there are just three that may have been better left out. (One story was a write-off as my Kindle (on Android) chopped up the letters and every third line was blanked out, so that one is no fault to the writer!)
I'll end the way I began- at $1.50 for over 420 pages of some of the most fun, action-packed, entertaining stories you're likely to read this year, this should be your next Kindle read!
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