Small Victories by Elliot Kay

Small Victories by Elliot Kay

This is a collection of short stories from Elliot Kay’s three fictional universes: Good Intentions, Wandering Monsters, and Poor Man’s War. He starts with several from Good Intentions of which only two interested me—Rough Day and Good Neighbors. The first of the stories shows the limits to what angels can accomplish when trying to deal with the problems in Seatle, and the second involves Alex and Rachel confronting a demon in their apartment building. Both of these stories advanced our understanding of the characters and the second had quite a bit of action in it. The others in this section were mostly excuses to write about sex. I don’t have any problem with sex occurring in a story, but I prefer it to support the story as opposed to “be” the story. I suppose you have to run into this problem occasionally when one of the main characters is a succubus.

 

The next two stories were in the Wandering Monsters universe and each was a shorter example of what those novels were like. The characters are all monsters serving as a sort of adventurer band such as you would find in any Dungeons & Dragons game. The fact that the monsters are the good guys (and they actually are “good” people) puts a bit of a twist on the stories that makes them a little more fun.

 

The final stories occur at different times in the Poor Man’s War universe ranging from during the first book to after the fifth. They were all solid short stories which you don’t have to have read the series to enjoy (as were those in the Wandering Monsters universe). I hope that Kay publishes more collections such as this and that he takes his cue from the last two sections not the first.