Hex Appeal [Paperback]

This is a large paperback, admittedly, but the font is quite large, which I think is a clever ploy to make it seem a larger, better value book than it really is. I quite enjoyed it, though I only bought it for the Jim Butcher, Ilona Andrews and Lori Handeland tales; I did end up reading all.

Most seem to be set in established 'worlds' from these authors, so it was kind of hard to get a grasp on the tales, but all are solid enough paranormal reads for a one-off.

I'm especially glad I read the JB tale, as there hasn't been a full-length Harry Dresden tale for some time, and apparently there still won't be til next year. I've not read anything by JB for some time, but I had no trouble picking up this tale, which involves HD helping out Bigfoot. Not 'the' Bigfoot, but his friend Bigfoot.

The Ilona Andrews tale was set in the world of Kate Daniels, who IMHO, is her best creation, but doesn't feature any of the characters we've seen so far, and it took place in Philadelphia, not in Kate's domain. I was hoping for a tale featuring characters we'd at least seen before, which it wasn't, but it was a decent tale featuring Saiman's cousin, and was a worthwhile read as a freebie, but I'm not sure I'd have wanted to pay for it as a freestanding, paid-for Kindle read. It wasn't quite worth that, and I'm also debating whether it'll be worth reading GunMetal Magic, which comes out in a few weeks, featuring Kate's friend Andrea.

The Lori Handeland tale is from her now defunct Phoenix Chronicles series, and explains why things went wrong between Jimmy and Liz. It's the encounter between the fairy Summer and Jimmy, on Ruthie's orders, and would have been very welcome a couple of years back, before the series got cancelled due to falling sales. As it is, it seemed a cheap, no-brainer addition to the series, and it's a bit of a disappointment, as not much happens, other than a betrayal of both Liz and Summer. Additionally, I'm further peeved to find that despite the author saying on her website that she might consider self-pubbing the remainder of the PC series, she's since stated (I emailed to ask),that she has no plans to go down this route at present, but instead invited me to check out her upcoming Western novel. Not a great marketing ploy, and irritating too!

I got a nice surprise from Rachel Caine - an adult supernatural tale, featuring a woman in a regular day job, who by night investigates the paranormal, and whose boyfriend is a zombie she's risen. A proper tale, a bit of romance and betrayal that's not quite as it seems, and this was a great little tale. It made me wish that these leads could have longer novels of their own.

The other novellas were decent, but not my thing, therefore I'm not going to detail them, but they all had plot, an actual tale, and overall, this is a decent antho.

Note: I actually got this book through Audible, as an audio book, but I think the review applies to the text version too.

I picked up this anthology because I'd heard about it from somewhere and thought it might be an interesting sampler for a collection of today's better urban fantasy authors. While I've heard of some of the authors, the only one I'd ever read anything of was Jim Butcher, so I came in here with no clue as to the nature of the worlds or the kind of storytelling I was expecting.

Unfortunately, many of these made poor short stories for the simple reason that they had to expound huge amounts of backstory for you to understand the world, or they didn't and you then didn't understand what was going on.

I kind of expected the best of the set to be Jim Butcher's, and I wasn't wrong. While there is a vast array of background in Harry Dresden's world, you didn't need to know much of it to get the story or the characters, and Butcher does not reveal it if you don't need to know. The story is pretty cool too.

I had heard good things about Simon R Green and I'm sorry to say that his story put me off his Darkside series entirely. I didn't like the characters or the storytelling.

Lori Handeland's "There Will be Demons" has the only decent sex scene in it. (If you're looking at that cover and title, and expecting something sexy, don't be fooled.) Beyond that, it appeared to make essentially no sense. Snow Job by Carole Nelson Douglas suffered badly from the author's desire to place the story within a series. If I heard "Post Millennium Revelation Vegas" one more time I might have shot something. Cherry Kisses by Erica Hayes and The Aracane Art of Misdirection by Carrie Vaughn were good enough, I enjoyed them, but they didn't make me want to hunt down more books, and the remaining tales were just basically filler, from my point of view.

Maybe, if you are enthused over the series these fall into, you would get more out of the stories. I would not say this was a complete loss, and it did keep me entertained to some degree, but it's nothing to write home about.

This collection of short stories was kind of a mixed bag. I enjoyed a few of them very much, kind of liked a few and wasn't keen at all on the others.

The Good
The first story by Iona Andrews was pretty interesting but not quite enough for me to rush out and pick up the authors other books. Cherry Kisses by Erica Hayes was a decent story and memorable but I really didn't like the characters. Carrie Vaughn's story was good but felt more like a teaser than a stand alone story.

The Awesome
The P.N. Elrod vampire story was awesome and I will definitely be checking out this writer's other stuff. The characters were cool and the story was action packed. The Harry Dresden Bigfoot story was excellent, as expected (I'm a huge fan of the Dresden files). But the standout favourite for me was Simon Green's story - I just love Dead Boy, he's a brilliant character and finding out more about him was worth the cost of buying this book alone.

The Bad
I didn't really enjoy the rest of the stories. I must admit I'm not a big fan of Rachel Caine, I read the story on the off chance it might convert me but I'm still not a fan. The other couple of stories in there just didn't strike my interest for whatever reason and I don't remember much about them.

Overall I'd say there's enough good in there to make this book a worthwhile purchase, whatever your supernatural tastes are. My personal preferences made me rate the book 3 stars, I would have rated the 3 stories I really enjoyed 5 stars though.