I’ve been wishing for all of Bill Crider’s works to show up on e-books, so when this short story collection appeared, I had to plop down my $2.99 and download the epub version. It’s available from Crossroad Press and you can choose epub/PDF/mobi/kindle versions. Since it doesn’t come from the big ebookstore outlets, I assume it’s DRM free. At least I didn’t have any glitch in dragging the downloaded file into iTunes and copying it over onto my iPhone.
The stories were great, as I had expected from Bill. Some were visits with old friends like Sheriff Dan Rhodes and Truman Smith, but there were other characters that I’d never met since I, sadly, have only a dozen or so of Bill’s books in my collection. It was fun seeing his touch on the werewolf, and the vampire and Elvis stories. Each story has an intro paragraph or two and I warn you, if Bill cautions you that a story is dark, and that’s not your thing, pay attention. I didn’t, and that’s my fault. Bill Crider is a master storyteller and if he drifts off into the dark… Well, like I say, it’s my fault for not listening. But even if you skip over those, the remaining stories are well worth every penny.
My only gripes are technical things. My copy of the ebook didn’t have a functional table of contents, but since I read it straight through, that wasn’t much of an issue, and I think one of the intro paragraphs that should have been in italics wasn’t. The rest was clean and well presented, with no other typos to offend.
I highly recommend this anthology, and if you like the style, just remember that there are a ton of Bill Crider novels with some of the same characters just waiting for you.
Disclaimer: I like Bill Crider and I read his Blog every day. He’s even said some nice things about my books as well.
Thanks for the kind words, Henry!
I'm still waiting for your complete back list in epub.