“The City” by Vivienne Pustell“The Grudge” by Thoraiya Dyer“Coaltown” by Heather Clitheroe“The Town the Forest Ate” by Haralambi Markov“Blackthorn” by B. Morris Allen“The Forgetting Field” by Caroline Ratajski“Reef” by K.C. Norton“Ouroboros in Orbit” by J. Daniel Batt“In the Water, Underneath” by Damien Angelica Walters“Scab Land” by Wendy N. Wagner“Twilight State” by Gemma Files“Cactus Flowers and Bone Flutes” by Mercedes M. Yardley“Drowning Again in an Ocean of Her” by Ken Scholes and Katie Co...

Thought-provoking range of stories about the spirit of place and how it manifests. This was a project on Kickstarter that I backed, and the result is a really lovely collection.Some of my favorites: The Forgetting Field by Caroline Ratajski, The Snow Train by Ken Liu, Scab Lands by Wendy N. Wagner, and The South China Sea by zm quy`nh (apologies for the typography).

This is mostly a fantasy anthology that includes some top=notch authors. There is a nice variety, and the quality is high overall. I would have missed this had I not received a review copy, which would have been a shame. This will probably satisfy a lot of sci-fi anthology fans too.I really appreciate the copy in exchange for my review!!

Most of the stories were not to my taste. Anyone who likes horror, inconclusive endings, and/or literary pretentions style might like them more than I did. There were a few stand-outs that I enjoyed.

A very good collection of short stories, this book and its sibling. While united in theme, the stories vary wildly, but the names involved are enough to make this book worthwhile.

Thoroughly loved illustrating these tales. The reading beforehand was a delight, and I can't wait for the world to get to read them all.

Genius Loci is an anthology of stories about haunted places. Some of the hauntings are good, some benevolent while others are nasty and down-right dangerous. As with any anthology, the reader's experience may vary. I enjoyed several of the tales, but found that my overall enjoyment was less compared with Animus Mundi which covers similar territory. Still glad I read the book.

"There are places in the world that feel alive."All places have their own personalities.The Romans believed that the spirit of the land - also known as 'genius loci' - protected his own area.Nowadays some people might dismiss this as mythology.But have you ever had that strange feeling that you can sense a landscape's atmosphere?If so, this book is right up your alley!Almost every short story in this anthology is based upon a real location.What's totally unique about the book's concept is that (...

So, the way this works is that I'm going to review every short story by itself, and have an individual rating there. Afterwards, I'll average the rating and pick the amount of stars I want to give it. You can see them right now, but I haven't tapped it yet as of this writing. I read one short story every day, which was definitely a nice experience, haven't read a collection this way in a long time.Anyway. Let's get to it!Vivienne Pustell - The City - 5/5The opening story very quickly turned into...

I’m not great with short story collections, but I liked this one, and its theme of genius loci, or, spirit of a place. The stories were pretty varied, and I liked them all. My faves were:-And the Trees were Happy: a nice follow up to Shel Silverstein’s "The Giving Tree". I loved the feel of the remorseless power of roots and age.-The Forest for the Trees: Lovely, sad, and hopeful, all at the same time.-Beer and Pennies: Vivid, though not scary, I liked the attitude of the spirit.-After party: or...

As anthologies go, this one was dense. Most of the stories in here were spicy dark chocolate truffles for my imagination; I could only consume a few at a time or the intensity of flavor made it hard to actually enjoy them. The forwards for each story provided an education about a place, type of spirit, or time. The stories did not lean on the forwards as much as I expected, but stood on their own without contexts. The introductions just made the stories richer.I admit that I'm an American girl,

Thanks Outland Entertainment, Jaym Gates and Netgalley for the ARC.Summary: Some of the stories in this book (Well of Tranquility, The Trees Were Empty, and Forest For The Trees) are good. None are great. Most are just ok. Some are annoying.(view spoiler)[The City, by Vivienne Pustell: A smart city eats people away to nothing, and people quickly lose their memories of the people who were once there. They have to paint themselves so they disappear slower. It ends with (view spoiler)[a woman paint...

From the introduction to this anthology, it seemed the editors were going for a kind of rural gothic vibe, a la the Denny’s Tumblr universe (I’m sure there are better, more literary allusions to be made but this is my review so this what you’re gonna get). For me, this introduction and the individual introductions to each story were the weakest links in the whole. When you're aiming for a sense of mystery and the unknown, trying to over explain the concept of, for example, what an "intelligent c...

Thank you to NetGalley for providing this book for review. I really enjoyed reading this anthology. Some stories I enjoyed more than others, but I don't think there was a story that I didn't like. I was disappointed because I mostly wanted to read this book for Seanan McGuire, but her story was not in the version that I read. In saying that, some of my favourites were Forest for the Trees, Beer and Pennies, and Pocosin. I think the concept for The City was really great, but the story just made m...

In brief: A gorgeous collection of amazing stories, all to do with the spirit of a place. Got it from a Kickstarter so I’m not sure how available this actually is. (Sorry!)Thoughts: Oof. Earlier this year I reviewed an anthology that fell rather flat for me, and I think I mentioned that anthologies are never totally solid. There’s always a story or two that feels different, that doesn’t quite fit the theme or uses a writing style that doesn’t grab me or annoys me for plot or character reasons. T...

This book had so much potential to be good, but it fell flat in the end. A few of the stories were five-star reads, but the rest were average or below. I have read other stories by these authors and enjoyed them. This book just wasn't for me.

It would be gauche to formally review an anthology in which I appear, but I can informally, casually do it, right? This is the anthology with my first sale in it, and I think it's a pretty great story, and it fits in quite well alongside these other tales of the spirit of place. Genius Loci is one of the more tonally cohesive anthologies I've read: the stories are generally rich in atmosphere and setting (which makes sense), and they tend to be dark tales with dark endings. Some lightness does s...

The authors featured in the synopsis of this book are not listed in the table of contents. I was really looking forward to the scifi stories in this collection. I will check back closer to release date to see if any more was added.

some of it's frighteningly grim. the rest is awesome too.

some of it's frighteningly grim. the rest is awesome too.