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Out of context quote:

"Jane Clayton’s eyes riveted themselves upon it. Her palm itched to grasp the huge butt."

Tarzan is bound by ropes in a village, and he can't make his animal friends understand that he's trapped and he wants them to free him. This includes his panther companion, who he befriended earlier by freeing him when he was trapped.

These books are short and brisk, and I don't mean to suggest that it's dragging, but Tarzan is showing a strange lack of urgency in his situation. He needs to get off this island to rescue his son, but he's just hanging around for weeks establishing relationships with the local jungle animals. He crafts weapons, but so far gives no indication of preparing to build a boat or prepare wood for a signal fire.

This is really 2.5 stars, but I round up as always. The ending was a long infodump that doesn't resolve what I *thought* was the story, just tries to pull a bunch of twists, several of which I didn't care about. At least the final twist at the very end was welcome, though improbable.

Okay, that's some Game of Thrones level BS right there.

The male characters have sci-fi names like Jommy, Kier, and Jem, but the female characters have ordinary names like Kathleen, Patricia, and Joanna. Okay, sure, there's also a John and a Davy...

Granted, they've firmly established that humans consider Slans subhuman, but I was not expecting this exchange:

Ignoring his comment, she said now, “I sense you’re still planning to rape me one of these days.”

Silence from behind her. Finally: “Yes,” he said quietly.

It started with some very overtly expository "As you know, Bob" dialogue, and one of the main characters makes some very stupid decisions for a supposedly super-intelligent being, but he is supposed to be young, so that's not too bad. The characters are very exaggerated and melodramatic, but it's better than being boring.

"Distant Drum" is a very brief flash fiction about an angel getting corrupted by a ravenous demoness. The world setting is barely sketched out. It seems to be an average modern-day world, except there are also lots of earthbound angels and demons roaming around.

The editor stated in the introduction that there was no theme for this issue, but this is manifestly false. "Payday" is yet another revenge story, and like the last one, there isn't much to it. A bullied boy lures one of his tormentors to an abandoned government installation in the woods, to a fate you could see coming a mile away.

There wasn't much to the story "IOU". A woman uses a voodoo doll to get revenge on her violent husband, and police find out. That's it.

"The Shadows Beneath the Stone" was a good story with interesting supernatural elements, good characters and dialogue, about the Scottish heir of a Templar family that was massacred by the church, using sorcery to summon the ghosts of both his family and the church soldiers who died there, to have an undead rematch battle.

"A Housekeeper's Revenge" is a great post-apocalyptic story about a bereaved mother who makes it her mission to track down and kill the 13 elites who summoned monsters to kill everyone else in the world, in exchange for their own immortality.

"By Post" had a lot less of the overt supernatural to it than the first story, and felt more like a Stephen King-style horror story. It was less about the supernatural, and more about the deterioration of a group of friends as conflicts arose over contributions to a shared house and the anger and jealousy over changing romantic interests. One friend mind-controls another to get revenge on a third.

I enjoyed "Up From Slavery" quite a bit once it really got going, but I'm not sure how much others may enjoy it if they haven't first read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Poe and At the Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft. This story is set in the world established by those earlier books, and it does it well. Also, normally I don't like nonlinear narrative, but in this one it was fine.

Schmendrick is a lot more absent in the book than I remember in the movie.

Such a weird juxtaposition of so many great, poetic and melancholy quotes, interspersed with modern-day references, like "Take the A-train", "Last of the red-hot swamis", and "Have a taco."

“Haven’t you ever been in a fairy tale before? The hero has to make a prophecy come true, and the villain is the one who has to stop him—though in another kind of story, it’s more often the other way around. And a hero has to be in trouble from the moment of his birth, or he’s not a real hero. It’s a great relief to find out about Prince Lír. I’ve been waiting for this tale to turn up a leading man.”