Horror is not my genre, so I feel out of my depth in reviewing this story. It stuck with me, though – I'm writing this review nine months after I read it, and I still remember the story, the characters (the lying protagonist, the creepy Uncle Bob of the even creepier TV show, and, oh dear, the hill). I'm not the biggest short story person, so "it stuck with me" and "wtf was this trip" is honestly as much as I can hope for. Not sure how she does it, but Pinsker's stories are just always so memorable. The story is available online. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

A multiverse scifi story! A convention of variations of the protagonist meet up – they discover divergence points, similarities, identities, and a body (of course, you did catch the Agatha Christie reference?).

Very nice scifi about an intergenerational conflict on a multi(think >100) generational spaceship, focussing on music, both the people keeping old music alive, and the younger people rejecting history. I liked the setting and world building and characters, but I was hoping for more depth in every way.

Sarah Pinsker writes excellent short stories. This collection opens with some shorter stories, which I found too short: They ended before anything could happen, all just setting up a scenario, then leaving me hungry for something:

Magic born in the silent movies, or rather, in the people reading out the dialog cards in movie theatres. Creative, fun, nice commentary on the power of language and editors (did Pinsker write this to appease her own editors? who knows). I'd have rated it higher from other authors, probably, but my standards for Pinsker are unreasonably high. Still a neat thing to read. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Let this website attest that I like Sarah Pinsker a lot – I'm not a short story person in general, and I love hers. That said: I wasn't a fan of this book. Her usual skill with small scenes and emotional gut punches showed, but the plot was so extremely on the nose that I did my best not to eyeroll my way through it. Hard to engage with the cool characters when the plot is yelling its generic dystopia blah lecture at you. (tldr: Brain enhancement that some want, others not, peer pressure, hmmm, wonder if the sleazy bigcos will have our best interest at heart, unconvincing HAPPY GOOD END. The end.) This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.