I'm usually a big fan of this author's but this compilation did not work for me. I did not care for most of the stories.

Shotgun Bastards and Other Stories is a collection of flash fiction showcasing Andrea Speed’s fertile imagination. These stories range from death by crab invasion, random futuristic adverts, your average vampires and mages, and adventures in alternate dimensions. I love the stories! They were usually just a couple of pages long but most felt complete, some have high-impact and the rest showed good promise if turned into full-length books.

The collection is divided into 5 parts. The first part is the apocalypse section where various world’s end scenarios were speculated. This is my favorite part. The first story When the Rains Came reminded me of Hitchhiker’s Guide but instead of saying good bye and thanking us for all the fish, the dolphins participated in the wholesale slaughter of humanity along with the rest of ocean life. “Clean the oceans, humans” I think is the takeaway message here. It’s the End of the World as We Know It and I Don’t Give a Fuck stood out the most for me. Not only the title says it all and the MC was ace, the unnamed MC did the things I planned to do in case people were wiped out by a virus. Magic welders, aliens and vampires were also featured and there was another interesting scenario where the world falls apart because people were infected by ennui. Very plausible really. A couple of times the author was inspired by Oscar Wilde’s idea of the end of the world. Not the brightest view of humanity overall in this part of the collection.

The second part is full of absurd randomness from The International House of Cthulhu where you either eat the food or the food eats you, to Mr. Fix-it, a sweet human+bot slash where a human named Elon, with the help of a nice bot name Slom, tries to survive aliens taking over the space station. In between these, there is a cute love story, Cartoon Logic, where comic strip characters step out of a door to the real world and the fun, Mad Monster Sleep Over where monsters try to find answers to a fellow monster’s death. It is also apparent Andrea Speed does not like Christmas. I like the idea of turning the beloved Christmas symbols into terrifying beings because a monster Santa is really scary. Probably inspired by the French film or by Billy Idol, Eyes Without a Face is about pesky disembodied eyes infesting a house where a gay couple lives. Where these things come from nobody knows but yeah, that’s how random this is.

Part three is what I like to think of as the Tarantino section. Keyword: hard-boiled. Think Jackie Brown or Kill Bill. Women exacting revenge, slitting throats, firing shotguns. The title piece Shotgun Bastards features a woman shooting her way through a mob to rescue her captured twin brother who has vital information. She Broke Gods was about a woman on a mission to save all the girls trapped by a sex slave gang. She pretends to be a victim then proceeds to slaughter the gang. The two are the most action pack of the entire book. I would love to see these as movies.

Part four is more randomness, probably sketches and ideas and more monsters. Wolf & Fox is a zombie apocalypse scenario that left me wondering whether Wolf and Fox were humans or anthropomorphic animals (I wouldn’t be surprise if they were animals standing on two feet/paws). I was also shipping them but I guess it wasn’t that kind of story. They Fight Crime is a fantasy story vaguely inspired by Jack and the Beanstalk where magic-welders Coy and Danay fight skreaks with magic beans. What skreaks are, I don’t know. Spark Joy was about a women who was so meh about life but found a way to bring the spark back, literally. This is something most bored potatoes (me) can relate to minus the pyrokinetics. Noise is about that weird neighbor you never know would go berserk any minute so you have to treat nicely. Probably the weakest story of all.

Lastly, we have the sci-fi/fantasy part full of vampires, rebels and space-pirates. Past Prologue has a Ghost in the Shell feel to it where a woman with cybernetic body parts is hiding from the Imperator. This one has a nice twist in the end. I would like to see this as a full-length novel because the futuristic setting and the world are really interesting. Discount Skin Ticket and Seven Days of Fang are stories about darkest desires and the price people are willing to pay for them. The desires are the usual desires (immortality and some such) so I’m hoping someday we can have stories where the darkest desires involves something like secretly wanting to be Rainbow Brite. Soulmates and My Bloody Valentines are dark and compelling romance stories the author created for the Goodreads M/M Romance Group and plans to expand someday. I hope she does.

Shotgun Bastards and Other Stories is my first Andrea Speed book. I think it’s a good introduction to her work. The stories grab me from the start and majority of them worked.There is a streak of dark humor in some and others are just plain dark which I really liked. If you have a short attention span like me or want an in-between book for those 1000+ page door stoppers, this is a good book to dip into for some bite-size fun.

P.S.

I received a copy of Shotgun Bastards and Other Stories from Less Than Three Press via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Rating:
4 Stars - minor quibbles but I loved it to bits

Soundtrack: Burnin’ Up
Artist: A Flock of Seagulls
Album: The Light at the End of the World

Rating: 3 stars out of 5



A collection of tales filled with monsters, be they human or beast, ranging in setting from dystopia to pitch black noir and even general silliness. From the ludicrous to the frighteningly plausible; from deep space to after the end of the world. There are clumsy werewolves and bloody revenge, monster sleep overs and a dieting fad sure to kill your appetite.

Whether looking into the past or the future, you're sure to find that stuff gets really weird.

Shotgun Bastards and Other Stories by Andrea Speed is a collection of flash fiction in various  genres from fantasy to horror to science fiction.  Some are even grouped together further into subcategories like end of the world and dystopian societies.

Some of them have been previously published for the Goodreads M/M Don't Read in the Closet Events and I honestly felt those came across as the most complete, well rounded stories of the bunch, Soul Mates especially.

The rest of them felt less like actually flash fiction (complete stories of 300 words or so) than outlines or just written down sketches of possible stories the author has in mind for the future.

Quite a few show promise that I would love to see made into stories, whether its vampire hunters or the shotgun bastards of the title.  But there's so little to the characters or world building that the fiction doesn't really count as a full story, just a tidbit of what could be.  Which is most cases the author fully acknowledges.

There is a whole section dedicated to End of the Whole tales which gets to be a bit much.  After one or three, even as short as they are, reading about the end of the Earth, the species, it gets old.  Well, it did for me.  I would have broken this section up. Spread the tales out a bit.  But maybe the author wanted a depressing impact to hit all together.  I have no idea.  For me, it just made me want to skip over several and then return after a break.

Reading through these stories is like a walk through the author's likes and dislikes,  Speed's commentary in front of the stories makes that clear.  Merry Killmas?  Oh dear!  Yep, Christmas is definitely not the holiday for this author.  Short, horrific, and to the point.

If you are a fan of Andrea Speed, then I think you  would enjoy this trip through her imagination and possible plots for future books.  For fans of flash fiction, you might give it a try as well.

For everyone else?  Well, I'll leave that up to you.  As a fan of this author, I'm not sure it worked for me.

Cover art: Philip Lloyd Simpson.  This cover totally works for the collection and the author.  Perfect.

Ultra short stories (flash fiction) of sometimes silly, sometimes corny, sometimes overdramatic ideas that might work if developed into longer works. If you like the format, give it a shot. I prefer just a little more meat on the bones.

Eclectic mix of stories. Some funny, some less so and some trying to be serious, but perhaps failing because the fiction is written in a very over-the-top manner. I think she is more successful in her humorous stories and this collection would have been better served sticking to one direction or the other, rather than trying to blend both. That said I enjoyed more than half of these and would recommend it (for the amusing stories at least). She does definitely have a voice and a deft hand with dialog.