Review of Tad Williams’s THE VERY BEST OF TAD WILLIAMS

The Very Best of Tad Williams by Tad Williams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I take objection to the title of this collection. Mostly because I’ve read other works by Mr. Williams, and they exceed the story work found here. I don’t know if this was a last-minute decision by an editorial team (one who clearly lacked imagination), or simply a common choice for short story anthologies by a single author. But it failed to deliver on its promise.

Don’t get me wrong: there were enjoyable stories here. “The Boy Detective of OZ: An Otherland Story” convinced me I need to rush out and pick up the Otherland series. I laughed out loud through “Some Thoughts Re: DARK DESTRUCTOR” (even if the title failed to match the name used throughout the story). The language made things challenging, but “A Stark and Wormy Knight” was cute. And I rather liked “Omnitron, What Ho!”

But I turned pages automatically for the rest (which made up the bulk of the collection). There was so much useless present tense (am I beating a dead horse on that? Probably) And nothing that stood out as interesting – for anyone, much less Mr. Williams. I’ve seen something similar by other authors, often with a better hand. Or I failed to understand where he was attempting to go with the story. (Was “Monsieur Vergalant’s Canard” merely inserted to fill pages?) It wasn’t the continuous adventure into a creative mind that I had hoped.

Certainly not worth the time I forgot I hadn’t read the book.

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