Book #34 of 2023: Deep Breath Hold Tight | 3 DNF: Fluffy's Revolution, Warchild: Pawn, Epoch

Deep Breath Hold Tight by Jason Gurley. Oh this book. Self-published. Anthology. In my experience, that's two strikes even before I read the first word.

Theme of this wonderfully titled book was "end of the world" in all meanings of that phrase. Sometimes literal, sometimes not. Sounded interesting, but still. Self-published. Anthology. I was braced to hate it.

Then I read the first story. Wow, was it good! Wolf Skin was set after the end of the world, just little packs of men roaming the countryside, killing and raping and stealing. It edged towards horror (every man these packs encountered were killed, every woman was raped, had a hand cut off, and kept in the pack to be raped whenever the men wanted to), but still it was a well-written story.

The second story, The Caretaker, was really great as well. A caretaker of a space station (a woman just holding down the fort until a crew of scientists arrives) is saved from the end of the world by being up there. She watches countless nuclear explosions across the planet below. The station's AI confirms that if anyone is left alive, they'll be dead soon. Then she gets a signal from outer space...

At this point I googled the author to find out what else he wrote, because I wanted to get a book by him. Only to find out that all his books are written with no quotation marks around character dialogue. SIGH. Why? Why are authors doing that?

But at least I had Deep Breath Hold Tight, so I went back to reading.

Most of the rest of the stories weren't standalone stories, they were excerpt of the books he had published. The books with no quotation marks. SIGH.

At least I enjoyed the first two stories...

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Since my TBR pile is shrinking fast, I'm trying something new with DNF books. I'm trying to stick with them longer, to be really, really sure I want to DNF them.

DNF #77: Fluffy's Revolution by Ted Myers. I liked the idea of this one, but there were way, way, way too many coincidences for me to keep going. The story is about a world in which some animals have been genetically lifted, made smarter than even humans (this was done by accident, then the animals spread their better genes through the wild). I would have loved to read that story if it had been written with more skill.

DNF #78: Warchild: Pawn by Ernie Lindsey. I tried to read this one just a couple days ago, and for the life of me I couldn't remember what it was about. It was that generic. I had to read all the reviews on Goodreads and Amazon before I finally remembered. Generic YA dystopian. Two armies. One girl main character and two boys. As soon as I got the first hint of a love triangle, I ran away.

DNF #79: Epoch by Terry Schott. This book was so very odd. Start with a soup of conspiracy theories and add in a book that somehow is going to bring down all of society (a book that's just so revolutionary that anyone who reads it will no longer accept the world as-is). That book's title... Sticks and Stones.