Bokelskere.no

A diverse collection of original short stories using the concept of dead letter mail or other items from a dead letter office as a starting point. The editor of the collection sent the authors a prompt by mail, and they did their assignments quite differently. That’s a very cool idea I wish I’d seen more of. They all seem to be quite experienced writers of novels and collections of their own too, which you can read more about in an afterword after each story. And a surprising number of them are even award-winning. It’s impressive. You get a good sense of their writing style here, so this is the perfect opportunity to discover new authors, which I definitely did.

“You might detect, in the breath of air that rises from the unsealed flap, notes from the room in which is was penned, or the person who held the pen. It’s a tangible memorial. A palpable moment that can be held and read and referred to in the way that the ephemeral email or tweet cannot. In time all of that will be lost.” (1-2)

The stories are not quite what I expected, though - in a good way, because the setting is not just in a so called "dead letters office" or some returns center etc.. The only thing that the stories seem to have in common, is letters or packages. Some of them have unknown origin, some of them end up in unintended places, some have an unknown sender or recipient or both. A wide range of genres are covered too, from weird fiction, science fiction and fantasy to meta fiction, crime stories and thrillers and absurdist stuff that’s not always about the letter/package, but about incomprehensibly powerful entities, addiction, obsession, time machines, aliens, cults, even letter eating wizards! A very enjoyable collection with a more than average number of great stories.

(les min anmeldelse av hver enkelt novelle på Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6637133500?book_show_action=false)