Thomas Frail

I am torn. There were 3 to 4 of these short stories that I didn't care for in the slightest, however the rest of them I really did enjoy. (Hence 3 instead of 4 stars)

Thomas Frail gave his readers unique story concepts including but not limited to a few Twilight Zone-like tales, a hitman story and a thoroughly enjoyable Sherlock Holmes fan fiction. Some of the stories had so much heart and were intriguing but some left me with an icky feeling and a distrust of humanity. To further conflict me were the prologues to every story. Most of the prologues were unnecessarily lengthy and just unnecessary, period. The stories were strong enough on their own without any explanation. Definitely worth the read. I will be rereading my favorites soon.… (més)

As is often the case with that kind of collections, I liked some of these stories better and others less. Devotion – a strong start, concise, with good prose.
Dad – not quite as good, but still good

The rest of the stories, while not terrible, however serve to highlight the shortcomings of self-publication.
A good professional editor would have done a lot towards eliminating both spelling and grammatical errors, wrong word choices etc. They would also have got rid of needless repetitions and would, ideally, have insisted that the stories be cut down by roughly a third to actual short story length. The rambling, awkward style was particularly bad in the “prologues” (themselves of short-story length) with which I very quickly lost patience and had to skip altogether.

It is however, not an editor's job to correct factual errors and mistranslations: "Onus ad Astra" does NOT translate to "Burden of the stars", "Sputnik" does not mean "traveller" nor "Krasnoyarsk luna", "red moon". Astana, in the timeframe of our story, actually went by Nur-Sultan.

It's a great pity about some of the stories, which show the author to be actually onto something, and which definitely deserved a better execution.… (més)