Eine Klage-Welt

A review of Dying for It: Tales of Sex and Death
in The Pedestal Magazine

Putting together a themed anthology of genre fiction can be a perilous task. An editor who solicits stories focusing on Civil War werewolves or about murders solved by robots is liable to find herself facing a high stack of responses that exhibit the worst clichés of the genre in question, rehashes of the most mechanical plots, characters who speak dialogue lifted from old B-movies. A key to success, maybe, is balance: make the thematic requirements narrow enough to elicit stories that belong together as a coherent volume, but not so narrow as to strip the writers of their own peculiar brands of creativity. Mitzi Szereto, editor of Dying for It: Tales of Sex and Death, gracefully avoids the pitfalls and offers a book of stories that are more than typical erotica....