I picked up this collection of short stories because Seanan McGuire had a story in it. Specifically one from her Sparrow Hill Road series, which is connected to the InCryptid series. And since I will read just about everything she puts out into the universe, I picked it up. I wasn’t disappointed by her story, it was fabulous. The rest were, meh, ok.
I found this to be a middling collection of short stories, but I’ll be honest it was the framing device that really bothered me. I think the idea of building a collection of stories around a series of haunted/cursed coins is a good one. However, there’s giving authors some framing for their stories and then forcing a story to fit into your framing device, and I believe this collection did the second. Brozek followed each story up with a little snippet that forced a specific view point on the stories and it became repetitive. In addition, these little snippets often directly contradicted something from the original story in order to make the story fit into the mold that Brozek wanted it to.
As for the stories themselves, I mean some were good, most were mediocre. I don’t particularly enjoy reading about someone being cursed with bad luck simply because they got unlucky so I found the stories where the coins brought out the darker nature of the characters to be more enjoyable. There were also stories where I could see that this is what the author was attempting, but didn’t succeed.
There are better short story collections out there, but I don’t think you necessarily need to avoid this one. It’s fine, but not amazing.
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