Motley Is A Fool's Uniform

The Goth Sex-Kitten and Other Stories is a collection of six short stories from Dave Freer. It is available for the princely price of US$2.99 from either Amazon (as a Kindle book) or from Naked Reader (as anything else).

I highly recommend reading this anthology cold. I did, having bought it because I liked the author's previous works. It was only whilst writing this review that I noticed that both web sites give a "product description." Don't read the product description. Just buy the book. Even this one sentence on each story is too way much advance information. You are going to have to trust me. If you like good fantasy short fiction, you will like these stories.

The Goth Sex Kitten is a fairly standard misplaced person comedy, with a lot of "nudge, nudge, wink wink, say no more."

Rob is very nicely done, but very short and succinct. It hinges on a linguistic pun and reader knowledge. The juxtaposition of knowledge and lack of knowledge works very well.

As for Jack, well it is my considered opinion that this short story is worth twice what you paid for the whole collection. Very nicely done. Mr Freer sets just the right tone. And perhaps even asks if truth might be a more powerful illusion after all.

You would think that Left Behind harkens back to the old Cunning Man tales, but you'd be mistaken. It shows that Mr Freer is not just a fisherman but also a fisher of men.

I found If I Wake Before I Die to be the least satisfying of the pieces, which, when all is said and done is probably appropriate to the nature of the piece.

Regency Sprite, on the other hand, felt very incomplete, leaving the reader to ask what happens next. One could see it easily turning into a much larger work.

So what are you waiting for. Buy a copy and make an ex-ichthyologist very happy.

I like a decent (or indecent for that matter) short story. The author is required to be succinct and tight with their writing. Unfortunately the short story market seems to be disappearing. So electronic publishing might be the answer to this. Unfortunately the banking system places a lower threshold on what is economically viable (I think anything less than US$2 actually loses the vendor money), so micropayments are out of the question. So this means the return of the anthology (and the collection). Which is a good thing.