The first of Seanan McGuire’s Ghost Roads novels is a collection of related stories/songs which were repurposed into four ‘books’. Book 1 is very good, the follow-up is not. Book 3 fluctuates a bit, while the conclusion is abrupt/lacking. It’s interesting… but ends up too uneven to really care about whatever the sequel might contain.
Laughter at the Academy is somewhat similar in that it’s a collection of stories, but here they’re all quite independent and run the gamut from Wayward Children to Newsflesh. You can see shades of those series, October Daye, the above mentioned Ghost Roads, Indexing, The Deep, and even Middlegame in the large assortment of mostly chapter-sized tales arrayed here.
Being anthology bait as many of them are, don’t expect a consistency of quality (’cause there isn’t any), but they succeed quite brilliantly in showcasing the range of topics/foci found in the author’s full-sized works. Interestingly, pretty much all of them are ‘dark’ in some manner and one of the stories (The Tolling of Pavlov’s Bells) may as well have been written specifically for the current viral crisis. My only complaint would be that the intermittent/inconsistent introductory trigger warnings lifted from the fanfic community are aggravating to read.
