Contribution to Mankind, by Linda Acaster, Reviewed

Herewe have a collection of short stories by an author who knows her craft. Thetales are all dark but, as with all good tales of the sort, carry patches oflight. Linda Acaster has an uncanny knack of undermining assumptions so thatthe reader finds her stories end rather differently from what might have been expected.Nevertheless, the endings are all apt; there is nothing either false orcontrived about them, it's merely that they lead to places not ordinarily considered.
Theauthor employs her considerable imagination to take the reader into unfamiliarworlds where all is not as it seems on the surface. Although ghosts and spiritspopulate some of these stories, they don't arise from the regular menu of ghoststories. Each has its own take on experiences that take us out of our normal,cosy world and plunge us into possibilities we might otherwise not encounter.
Asalways in this writer's fiction, the language employed is both apt and accessiblewithout being either patronising or too clever. She uses a down to earth toneto set the scene and to portray her characters. And the characters are beingswe might all have met, even those populating the other worlds she sometimestakes us into.
Thereis irony, some just desserts, and a glance into our possible distant futurewithin the tales in this collection. I enjoyed all the stories and commend themto you.
Asa bonus, the book also contains the opening chapters of Linda Acaster's 'Torcof Moonlight', a superb paranormal romance novel that stands out as more thanjust a great example of the form but as a demonstration that such works cantruly transcend the narrow definition of the genre and appeal to the widestreadership.