As with any collection, there are hits and there are missed, but even the low points in this one are worth experiencing.

The setting of Punktown is one of limitless, if grungy, possibility. High tech, low brow, alien and human: the intertwined elements are always interesting, and often deeply affecting.

At times, though, it seems like the science fiction workers are utterly unnecessary. Face, for example, could just add easily take place in New York, but that doesn't make it any less emotionally powerful.

A great collection. ( )

It's sad because I love stuff like this (the stories are all set in the same gritty human/alien city and interconnected with cameos of characters from other stories popping up at random - absolutely one of my favorite things in a story collection), but this is actually going to be a DNF for me. I normally don't rate DNFs, but this is one of those instances where everything was going pretty well (solid 3.5 star and rounding up) but then I hit Heart for Heart's Sake and it derailed. There are enough spoilers in other reviews that I will not recap the plot (this is the artist-sold-as-part-of-art-installation story). I will just cut to the main issue: Nimbus (the female artist) is a total freaking fembot. Authors out there, let me just issue a plea: if your story involves a protagonist being raped, and the wrap up looks anything like: [Woman:"Baby, I'm sorry I had to destroy your beautiful art (that I will never tell you got me raped)." Man: "It's OK I guess I can get a job so we never have to do this again" *hug* *walk off into sunset*] --- REWRITE. Rewrite immediately. I'm not saying a woman in this postition would never be so shellshocked that she would react this way. I'm saying that the way this reaction in this story was presented was so unbelievable I almost threw my e-reader. This woman should be awesome. I thought she was going to be awesome. Then she had not one believable shred of reaction to what happened to her. She exists to please her man-child. FEMBOT. The sad thing is that other stories in the collection had such emotional realism about situations of trauma (including rape) that this just stuck out like a soar thumb. I've been wrestling with this a while now, as I really did enjoy a few of the stories prior to this one, but I really don't think I can finish. This story has been bugging me for a month now and after an author commits an atrocity like this maybe I don't trust him enough to go back into the world he built. (I'm giving it two stars instead of one based on the strength of the other stories before the deal breaker.) ( )

Not badly written, but extremely depressing and almost without hope. I don't think I'm going to continue this anthology series because it simply drags me down emotionally. ( )

Jeffrey Thomas' Punktown is like a futuristic analogue of Jeff Vandermeer's Ambergris, a city both beautiful and frightening, where compassion and depravity mix freely and the truth of things are susceptible to sudden shifts and derangements. In the shadow of this strange city, with its biological curiousities and transdimensional visitors, people struggle to live out their lives. Thomas has a wild imagination, matched with an ear for prose and an eye for imagery. Punktown is a haunting, fascinating place worth visiting. ( )