This is a collection of short stories and novellas which take place in Seanan McGuire’s Newsflesh universe. Some deal with events that occurred before the main trilogy, some take place afterward, and a few of them I’ve written about before (though that post was lost in the first accidental site-wipe).
The first three stories are ones I had read before and cover the events of the Rising. Countdown is structured a bit like World War Z, Everglades is both extremely short and extremely bleak, and San Diego 2014 tells the emotional tale of the doomed final ComicCon attendees.
How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea is fairly lengthy, taking place after the trilogy and revealing some of what’s been going on in Australia. It’s a solid all-around continuation to the series that fits in pretty well with what came before despite the somewhat severe thematic shift and abrupt ending.
The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell is mostly set during the transitory period when the school system was still adapting to the new reality of zombie outbreaks; it’s heavily weighted toward the topic of security theater and can become a bit heavy-handed at times. Meanwhile, Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus is a much more lighthearted tale (which is not to say it isn’t dark, because it is) that once again shifts the timeframe to post-trilogy and provides some closure to the previous story. It’s kind of exposition-heavy in the beginning and doesn’t really add much though.
All the Pretty Little Horses and Coming to You Live are the only non-reprints in this collection. The former is again pre-trilogy (shedding some light on how Shaun and George’s parents ended up so mercantile) while the latter is post-trilogy, taking place after the earlier ones and expanding on the brief concern regarding the unknowns surrounding cloning technology that was brought up in How Green This Land. Though the first does a good job of filling that particular timegap, albeit unnecessarily, the second is pretty much completely unnecessary in all respects… which is not to say that it’s entirely unwelcome.
