Witpunk edited by Claude Lalumiere and Marty Halpern. I seem to recall reading somebody panning this anthology, but I can't recall who. I thought it was Dr. Pam, but I can't find it listed in her archives, so I have no idea.

Anyway, when I saw this in the library, I dimly recalled somebody panning it, but the list of authors on the cover-- James Morrow, Bradley Denton, Cory Doctorow, Dave Langford, William Browning Spencer-- looked too promising to pass it up. So I checked it out, which was a mistake.

This started off as badly as any anthology I can ever remember. First, there's a manifesto of sorts, never a good sign. Then there's an Allen Steele story that takes way too long to deliver on a premise that amounts to a lame joke. Next up is Ernest Hogan's "Coyote Goes Hollywood," which takes the "Native American trickster god in the modern world" premise of Christopher Moore's Coyote Blue and does less with it. Then there's one of a series of one-sentence pulp novels by Jeffrey Ford, which are too cute to amount to much, and finally "Auspicious Eggs," a stunningly bad James Morrow story featuring a postapocalyptic version of Catholicism that reads like a cross between Monty Python's "Every Sperm Is Sacred" and a Jack Chick tract. Had I had other options more entertaining than listening to Kate talking on the phone with Verizon's tech support, I would've pitched this out the window.

It does get a tiny bit better later on. The stories by Doctorow, Langford, Pat Murphy, and Robert Silverberg are all good, and Paul DiFillipo's story would. Be good. If it weren't. Written in fragments. For no good reason. But the first stories pretty much set the tone-- a bad mix of stories that aim for "transgressive" and end up just gross, too-obvious Twilight Zone horror, and ham-handed satire. This was Not a Good Collection.

The worst part is, I'm far enough behind on the book log that by the time I got to writing this entry, the book was overdue, so I actually had to part with money for reading it.

(Originally posted to The Library of Babel.)