 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another book review. Today we're talking about a short story collection. I don't read too many of those, but this one was highly, highly recommended and that is Little Paranoia's by Sonora Taylor. Just a heads up right off the bat. Me and Sonora, we're not, I wouldn't consider us friends, but we do interact on Twitter. So if you think there's some bias there, whatever. It doesn't matter to me at this point, what you think. But I try to review as honestly as possible. I don't try to. I do. And there will be criticisms here in this review for the book, but mostly it's going to be a good review. I know there's many people out there who automatically when they hear this person knows this person, they don't want to upset them, but there's been time and time again that I have reviewed things from people that either friends of mine or acquaintances of mine that I have not liked. But this book, I paid for this book. It wasn't an ARC. I bought this one. I bought Seeing Things, which is her novel and without condition, but without condition was out of stock. So it'll be coming eventually when she gets some stock back in. But yeah, Little Paranoia's I'm going to go through and tell you the stories that I liked. And then I'm going to do some minor criticism. I also wrote a review that's pretty much going to be this verbatim, this review verbatim, except for less rambling. You know, that's what I do in these. You can't really ramble in a written review. Look, I'm doing it already. What? Anyways, so we're going to jump into it. I'm going to go through and I'm going to tell you the stories that I liked. Let's see here. All right. So the first one that I read and I enjoyed was Wary Bones. If you can hear a truck in the background, I apologize. Sometimes you guys can hear it. Sometimes you can't. But Wary Bones is a very, very unique story and I was drawn in right off the bat. I had a lot of fun with it. I had this feeling like I was reading something special. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, there you go. I had this feeling that I was reading something special. It's one of those stories that you come across and you're like, Hey, this is a hidden gem. The more people should be talking about this one. I really, really enjoyed the creativity of it. It gave me a very clear visual image. Taylor was able to put me there and put me in this strange world and I really, really enjoyed that one. The next one is Always In My Ear, which is a very cool take on like the partner serial killer aspect. Kind of like natural born killers, that kind of thing. Very, very unique take on that with some future speculative fiction aspects that I enjoyed. I also like the twisty turniness of the ending. Every time I thought, I was like, Okay, that's nope, nope, nope, that's the twist. Okay, that's the twist. It just kept surprising me and I enjoyed that one a lot. The next one is Drops. This one was very, very short and very creepy to me. It got underneath my skin. I will say this, I was going to leave it till the end, but this is one of the shorter stories. There are a lot of stories in here. I would say they're a page long, even though they take up two pages because the story starts about halfway down the page, the way the formatting is set up, I would say they're about one page long. Certainly less than a thousand words, I would suspect. But anyways, the shorter stories are the weakest here, but that's not to say they're not good. They're just not as good. They're not as great as the other ones. They're not as great as the longer fiction and Drops is one of the exceptions to the rule here, where I liked it just as much as some of the other long form stuff. Quadra Pocalypse. I've never read anything like this story before. I enjoyed it for that aspect alone. It hops around as different elements are happening. You can take elements two ways there. Different things are happening. I appreciated what Taylor was going for. It's just not something that you see all the time. Of course, you do see the apocalyptic thing. You do see that quite often, but this was a unique take on it and I really appreciated it. I also liked how it went full circle. I really liked that aspect. Next one is Stick Figure Family. The only thing I'm going to say about this one is I will never look at the Stick Figure Family decals on the back of someone's car or window or whatever the same way ever again. Good job, Sonora. That was amazing. Let's see here. I'm going to talk about one more and then I'm going to go into my favorite, but so far they've been in order. This one is after my favorite, but I'm going to talk about it first and that is salt. I don't want to give away what this one's about because that's a special part about it, but I guess I have read something like this, but I appreciated the length, how succinct it was, and the writing was really good in this one too. I got this feeling that I knew what was going on right from the get-go and then all of a sudden I was throwing a curveball and it's maybe something I should have seen coming and maybe you'll see it coming, but I didn't see it coming. I thought it was something completely different. Unfortunately, that's a spoiler and the whole story hinges on me not spoiling it. I'd say it's my third favorite. Leery Bones is my second favorite, and my first favorite is Hearts Are Just Likes. This one, I don't even want to tell you what it's an ode to. Once you read it, it will be super, super obvious. At least it might be, I don't know. It's a retelling of a classic horror story that I thought was really, really well done. I talk about this constantly, how I look for pacing, dread, and characters in the stories that I read. Characters don't have to be likable. I just have to be able to see them and feel them and know what their motivations are, and this has all three of those. It's a great short story. It's a perfect retelling of this certain short story. I really, really enjoyed it. I love the character, even though I didn't like her. I loved reading about that character. The pacing was perfect, and along with the pacing, there was this mounting dread throughout the entire story. It's just fantastic, utterly fantastic short story. It's easily the best one in the collection. In fact, I think it's like leaps and bounds above the collection. Not that, like I said, once again, not that the rest of them are bad. It's just that this one was so good that I have to look, you know, these other ones have to be put way down here, and this one has to be put way up here. Now, I'm going to get onto my one criticism and the one story that I did not like. I already lost my page here. Okay, the title of this one made me laugh, and then to see that it... Anyways, the story is called Seed, S-E-E-D. It is called Seed, and it was more of a speculative fiction erotica, and I don't gel with erotica. That is a personal preference. If I'm going to have sex in my books, there has to be some kind of horror aspect or some kind of dread. Something ugly has to be happening. I don't read for erotic pleasure or stimulation or anything like that, and I tend to... It's not that the sex was badly written. It's just that that fit felt like the whole point of the story. Maybe the whole point of the story was companionship or something like that. I don't know, but that's the only story in this 20-story collection that I did not like. If I'm going to go even farther about it, the poetry did nothing for me, but that's only because I don't like poetry. It could be the best poetry ever written. It could be Sylvia Plast Levels of Amazing, and I still wouldn't like it. I've never found any poetry that really, really spoke to me, and that's not a failure of the author. That's a failure of me appreciating poetry. I just don't like it. But I mean, I still read it. It was quick to get through. It was okay. I understood the themes, but it's just not for me. Anyways, so have you read Little Paranoia's by Sonora Taylor? If you have, let me know down there in the doobly-doo whether or not you liked it, whether or not you hated it. If you liked it or hated it, let me know why you liked it or hated it so that we can have a discussion. But until next time, I have an E. You have been U. This has been another Book Review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.