(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

As I've mentioned before, I'm not the biggest fan of story collections, mostly because I find short stories to lack both the length and weight to justify doing an analytical write-up about in the first place; and so that makes it tricky whenever someone sends in a book of stories for me to review, in that the collection itself may be just fine but with me having almost nothing to say about it. Take for example The Black Heart, the new collection by Weird author Patrick O'Leary, one of a whole pile of books I recently received from British small press PS Publishing; it's a perfectly decent book, just as physically gorgeous as well as all of PS's other titles, yet at the end of it I find myself with not much more to say than, "...You know, it was fine. It was fine." For what it's worth, just from a content standpoint, it shares a lot of traits with fellow PS author Robert Freeman Wexler, just so you know what you're getting yourself into; they are stories that are not quite science-fiction, not quite horror, not quite absurdist humor, but a pleasing combination of them all, stories which then have endings that many times come straight out of left field and that you will never be able to guess at beforehand. (And might I mention, by the way, how much I particularly loved "Yo-Yo, Stradivarius and Me," about a guy who one day decides to beat the sh-t out of famous classical musician Yo Yo Ma, simply because he finds himself with a random opportunity to do so, and how he accidentally then finds himself in possession of a cello worth tens of millions of dollars but that he could never in a million years actually find a buyer for.) It's enjoyable for what it is, although I just don't have much to say about it; it's for sure a title you'll want to pick up if you're a fan of Weird short stories, though.

Out of 10: 8.5 ( )