Review of "Machine of Death" edited by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo and David Malki Item 16 - Finish 30 24 books

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This book has been sitting on my Kindle unread for almost as long as it's been out. So obviously I've put off reading it for a while. It's nothing against the writers, cartoonists or editors involved; I actually like a great number of them. More it was the tremendous number of books I've been working through for the last several years. This one fell to the wayside as a necessity and as a result of it being an anthology.

I'm wary of anthologies for the typical reasons: beating the same drum can become tedious and the works in them tend to be hit or miss. I was especially skeptical of this one as I figured that a good number of the stories would veer a little too frequently into "Twilight Zone" ironic twist territory. Note I did not say M. Night Shyamalan; he wishes he had a fraction of Rod Serling's storytelling skill (want to know what the twist in that new Will Smith movie he made is? It's that he is somehow still making shitty films! I know I didn't see it coming). And while there are certainly a number of "doo-doo-doo-doo"moments (you try and write that out phonetically without making it look stupid), there are also some really fun stories.

The strongest stories in this collection were (perhaps unsurprisingly) the ones where the characters accepted or embraced their deaths (please don't overanalyze what it says about me that I just wrote that). "Torn Apart And Devoured By Lions" by Jeffrey Wells, aside from being a delightful sentence to type is also a highlight of the collection for me. If you know that the most exciting thing that will ever happen to you is also going to be the last thing that happens to you, you might as well go all in on it.

As I was searching for the original "Dinosaur Comics" strip that instigated this collection in the first place (above, obviously) I found out that there will be a second anthology of "Machine." It may just be that I'm completely deathed out at the moment, but I can't see myself picking up a second compilation. I'm sure there are new things to be said on the concept, I just don't think I need to hear them for a while.