I seem to like dark and dismal short stories, and I found myself liking these. The first one, titled Mortal Gods, was, I believe, my favorite. It was about these aliens who come to earth and worship human beings, because humans die, and these aliens do not. I think that when I worry most about death, thinking about how it defines us, and makes us do things we otherwise wouldn't, really is something great.

Saving Grace, about a kid who wants so badly to be healed by a faith healer that he manages to paralyze himself and then finds out that the faith healer is nothing more than a con-man... but ends up having the gift of healing himself, was an odd story. I'm not sure I liked it. It wasn't bad, it just didn't make me think the way the first one did.

Eye for Eye I enjoyed. I liked the hero, struggling so badly with the weight of what he'd done on his shoulders. Someone who killed without meaning to for his entire life, and was trying to get it under control. He was very human, which is an odd thing to say about a kid who can kill by getting angry, but he was. He doubted, he grieved, he wanted to be loved...

St. Amy's Tale, a story about a family that destroys all technology, was harder to understand. Part of that might be the way it kept flipping from one time to another time. The underlying story I enjoyed, but I didn't really like the conclusion, I guess. What happened in the future, rather than the past.

Kingsmeat was a definite favorite. I'm not sure I understood the ending of that one either, but I really did like the majority of the story. In it there is a man who butchers people for the aliens to eat, daily, but he keeps the people all alive. The people are being tortured by this man. Then some spacemen come to save them, and everyone finds out that this person was actually doing everything in his power to keep them alive, and that on every other planet these aliens had lived on, all the humans had long since been killed. It's a definite mind twist to think of your torturer as your savior.

Lastly was Holy, I'm not entirely sure I enjoyed that one either. I like the duty and honor of the characters in it. One thing I'm really interested in is how exactly it relates to Card's Worthing stories, as they mentioned that the planet they were on was Worthing. It was very unlike any of the stories in the Worthing Saga. ( )