The adventures will have to wait until next year but the fiction anthology is here now. It is a mix of old works collected from over a half-dozen different books and a dozen new stories offering glimpses of the world of the God-Machine.
My first impression is the fiction is that these are unhappy stories. I mean that in the best possible way. These are stories about people being caught up in the vast unfeeling mechanisms (literally in one case). The excellently written stories describe horrifying things happening to people in a world gone wrong. There are however spots of light among the collection, flickering candles that only make the rest look even more grim.
As I mentioned there is some recycled material. Some of it like The Voice of the Angel are core components of the God-Machine mythology. The other bits are connection to the God-Machine included in later works, Easter Eggs for devoted fans. The repeats include Road Gospel from Midnight Roads, Residents from Mysterious Places, Stories Uncle Don Told Me from Spirit Slayers, M.R.E. from Dogs of War, Eggs from Urban Legends, and Diamonds from Asylum. All in all about a third of the book could be considered recycled. But for those of us without the entire collection (I personally lack Spirit Slayers and Dogs of War) this is less of an issue. The stories are excellent in any case.
The new stories are The King is Dead, dealing with an inescapable and cyclical destiny; Chicago Politics, where politicians are ground up by a real political machine; The Observer Effect, which seems to touch on Hunter: the Vigil; Prodigal; Quality of Life; Pilgrim; Ouroboros, where a homeless former professor must again save the world from a self devouring horror; Delivery Boy in Blue; Concession, Just a Bite, where we meet a new kind of zombie; Go Back; The Upstairs Tenant, where a man encounters a fishing lure for humans; and Grind, in which a pair of rednecks find a cog that needs oiling or else.
The best of the new stories, for me, fall into one of two categories. There are the truly dark stories where the horrors hold all the cards and the protagonists are doomed from the very beginning. These include Quality of Life where a woman finds herself trapped in a stepford wives situation that get much much worse. A similar situation is found in Delivery Boy in Blue where a cop asks too many questions about the jail on the edge of the town. Also in that list is Prodigal, where a crisis of conscience causes a man to confess his sins to a priest. We learn that the conspiracy’s reach seems almost total.
The second category contains those stories that end with hope. There are almost no victories in this series but there are some where one can still see the light. One of them, Pilgrim is very similar to Quality of Life in general structure but the tone is very different. A party organizer ends up starving and dying of disease in a foreign country after trespassing on ancient ruins. But where as in Quality of Life the protagonist’s identity is crushed and she become a cog in a machine, here the protagonist becomes one with the God-Machine, destroyed by ascension.
My favorite story however is Go Back, probably both because it reads like the opening to a larger adventure or story and because the protagonist is left in a position where she could win in some sense. Go Back tells the tale of a woman whose partner recently died. Following disturbing notes she left herself, she returns to the town where she had her honeymoon. There she discovers everything is a sham, even her relationship with her partner. But at the same time, she escapes with that knowledge as well as learning that some part of her knows the truth and is working to help her.
Overall this is an excellent series of horror stories and well worth your time to read even if you know nothing about the World of Darkness.
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