The Hero has to me become the most stale and uninteresting of character archetypes. I wonder if that's because the hero is often the most explored of the archetypes associated with the heroic journey. Characters like the Villain and the Sidekick or even the Love Interest have in my opinion more potential for exploration. But we've seen the Hero in pretty much every form: Good, Bad, Reluctant, Unnamed, Anti-, Violent, Passifist, Dumb, Honorable. Sometimes he's interesting, sometimes he's not. This anthology manages to rescue the Hero, as a character archytype, from the obscurity of over exploration by focusing on the part of the Heroic Journey least explored. Aftermath. The short review is simply that it works. It works so marvelously I want to tempt fate and ask for a sequel, just to see if it is possible to even do it again (Edit: Wahoo! There WILL be a second one - Link).

Before that I ask myself: How does one review an anthology? Is it appropriate to rate it as an average of the individual stories? Is it more appropriate to rate it on it's cohesiveness? Especially when there is a given theme as there is here? I'm not sure what answer if any is correct so I'll just try to explain why I finished this anthology with an extremely high opinion of it.

One of the most obvious ways to subvert a genre's expected tropes if to turn the Heroic Journey from one that ends in triumph and joy into one that ends in bittersweet or pyrric victory or perhaps defeat outright. Some of the best literature I've read does this and does it fantastically. Yet I rarely seek out stories that will leave the reader with a negative state of mind. The forward while appropriate did give me (and others) pause that this would be a collect of stories where heroes come home to find things negatively reflected with reality. Instead we get imagination, authors taking the most interesting written narrative format (the short story) and doing fantastically interesting and unexpected things with character that are labeled "Hero".

Not every story has a happy ending. The first story actually fulfills exactly the type of downer ending that I mentioned previously yet even that story is told with so much imagination that the sheer wonder of a girl being returned to life is an instant favorite. The stories only get more varied from there. The only real common thread is that in every story there is a character that has the label "Hero" whether some of them are or are not, whether we or even they would consider themselves such.

Some of the stories take conventional heroic situations and put a unique element (of mythos or plot) to yield unexpected outcomes. Some take stories of unconventional and unexpected heroes like Lesson's Learned and The Blue Corpse Corps). A few rely on word gags that wouldn't work in video similar to video gags that wouldn't work in print as in Twilight Zone's "Eye of the Beholder". One of my favorites was a story steeped in Asian culture simply because it was a type of hero I haven't be inundated throughout my culture.

The short story format is tight by it's nature. While few like Richard Matheson have been able to turn a short story into a leisurely paced single thought (Pattern for Survival), most are about taking a typical plotline and wording the tale in such a way that the reader can infer most of the previous (or following) events. These stories all pack quite a bit of plot line in such tiny narratives. The best part of a short story is rereading it again and again to watch everything unfold with the clues intact from the very beginning. A few of the stories towards the end were a bit complex and actuall required rereading in order to understand the fullness of the story. None of them fall apart. Reading them again they're just as good the second time as they were the first, a few even better.

This anthology is a classic example of taking the boring and making it exciting. Turning the Hero from a worn out symbol into a unique character was almost a form of magic. It's for books like this that I reserve my five star ratings. How much more could be done with the Villain? The Villain when created correctly can be terrifying and/or seductive. The Hero is someone we want to love. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't but we walk into a hero story wanting to love him. The Villian on the other hand is an unknown. I can't wait to read the companion anthology "When the Villain Comes Home" because if a collection of authors can do this much with a hero. How much more can they do with the Villain.

I received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads.