Review by clong (2005-10-29)
This Zelazy collection offers many strong stories, but none that really knocked my socks off. "Home Is the Hangman," a story about an early experiment in Artificial Intelligence that comes back to meet its makers, was the longest and probably my favorite of the bunch. Many of the stories were "short shorts," just a couple of pages long. They certainly demonstrate Zelazny's broad range of style, genre and subject matter. Several are humorous. "Recital" you would almost have to classify as experimental fiction. "The Naked Matador" is a dark little Hemingwayesque adventure story. The brief introductions to the stories were quite interesting, each offering a different variation on how a story comes into existence.