Once again, the fine folks at Moonstone Books have chosen an excellent selection of stories for this latest anthology, the second featuring the Avenger, the pulp hero created by Paul Ernst (but published under the house name Kenneth Robeson, the same one used by Lester Dent and the other authors who wrote the Doc Savage stories), and his able companions, Justice Inc. All 15 stories are well worth reading and show different facets of Benson, a man driven by justice after great personal loss. The most impressive thing to me about these stories is how character-driven they are and how much they flesh out the Avenger, whose pre-heroic background was alluded to many times in the original stories. As with several of Moonstone's publications involving pre-existing properties, this collection has stories involving the Avenger encountering other pulp adventurers, with the most obvious examples being Win Scott Eckert's "Happy Death Men", a team-up with the Domino Lady, also containing several allusions to other pulp, novel, and comics characters (also, apropos of nothing, my favorite story in the book), and David Michelinie's "The Blood Moon", which has Benson teaming up with the Spider to face the most fearsome vampire of them all. Moonstone is one of the leading lights of the current wave of pulp revivals, and this excellent anthology is further proof of that, in the unlikely event anyone doubted that.
