Aberrant Tales: A Short Fiction Anthology

by Jason Peters, Ashton Macaulay, Allison Middlebrook

Aberrant Tales is a collection unlike any other. Within this book are a variety of tales bursting at the seams with creativity and wonder. Tales of corporations that allow you to see into your own future. Tales of creatures that dwell within our dreams and nightmares. Tales of gallant knights battling through surreal, gothic landscapes to rescue the ones they love. These are stories that dare to be unique, to have a different point of view. Stories that entertain while conjuring up emotions of fear, excitement, and curiosity. Aberrant Tales embraces a variety of narratives from the realms of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and weaves them into one satisfying, eclectic package. Featuring twelve unique tales, Aberrant Tales will keep you on your toes as you experience the thrill of careening from one genre to another. With Aberrant Tales , you truly never know what type of story you will encounter next. So prepare to fully immerse yourself in this collection of twelve fascinating tales filled with suspense, intrigue, and imagination. You’ll find it to be one hell of a ride.

264 pages, Hardcover

Published September 25, 2018

Reviews

[Lance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not your usual collection of short stories. Aberrant Tales will take you one step beyond the outer limits of the twilight zone.

[Vanessa Krauss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short story collections tend to run on a unified theme, like, "here be dragons" or "a collection of introspective plumber prose." This anthology is unified by how collectively weird and dark its themes are, and something usually dies. It has got dark speculative, dark humor, dark sci-fi, horror, and one dark high fantasy that looks like it travelled from the 1970s and came over to say "Hi!" Publisher did a good job making a genre sandwich, so you're not getting 3 sci-fis back to back. Random call out, but greatly appreciated.

Highlights: The first story is a great opener and has one of those stories that are told that when you finish it and think it over the reader gets a whole other narrative on top of it. It's clever. The last one has an amazing POV, it's funny, great voice.

Lows: For the virus-themed story, I wish it was longer and threw in some additional hijinx. I figured there could be a bit more added to it following the ending, so I would have liked to have seen more. As well, because the dark theme unifies all of the stories it becomes a waiting game of how X will be screwed over. Because that is so consistent it's hard to feel cheated at least.

PSA: If you like dogs, there is one story that is probably triggering. Otherwise, it's hilarious.

[John Ceccarelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starting off with a bang, and ending with quite the double whammy, this short story collection offers a ton of well paced value for a wide variety of audiences. The compilation avoids double dipping in terms of theme/general story, as no title cannibalizes another. Each entry is unique and tackles a different topic. Overall the general genre ranges between sci-fi, horror, and some fantasy, however no story feels like another. That being said, several stories have a feeling of being picked from the middle of novels, with no clear beginning/middle/end. While still interesting reads, I found myself lost during some of these. Each story is well paced and easily consumable though, so the few that didn't grab me didn't last long. My personal favorites in the collection centered around a man peering into what life had to offer him, and a thriller in a water tank. I found myself staying up later than usual to finish each story, and tore through the short story collection rather quickly. Highly recommend for those looking for thought provoking but easily consumable content.

[Ben Mariner · Rating 4 out of 5]

What and interesting collection of stories this was. Some of them were dark. Some of them were humorous. Some of them were uncomfortable (in a good way). But all of them were extremely well written and fun to read. There are some very great writers in here sharing their talent in a condensed form and I highly suggest you explore not only this collection, but anything else these folks have written.

[Ashton Macaulay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclaimer, I am the author of the first story in this collection, so my review will only be speaking to the other tales. There are some absolutely fantastic stories in here from up and coming writers that run the gamut from a bad acid trip to travels in distant alternate futures. What I loved most is how unique the writing styles are, as well as the breadth of subject matter. Aberrant Tales doesn't hold anything back and isn't afraid to get a little weird with it.

Overall, it's a great showcase of 12 indie authors with stories you're not going to find anywhere else. Highly recommend.

[Candice Orick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The biggest strength of this book is the variety of tales. It starts with a cyberpunk story and then veers in a totally different direction. I looked forward to each segment because I never knew where it was going to take me next. The writing from each author was unique and more than competent. I can easily recommend this book to anyone because there will at least one story they will enjoy.