Customer Reviews

A City Equal to My Desire

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Sallis. Poet. Reviewer. Cook (chef?). Writer. His Lew Griffin series is wonderful. His criticism succint, informed, generous. This collection? Suffice to say this is the book to give to your lover, your best friend, the person you suspect might be your next, should have, could have been your partner. Someone who, in the dark hours you can count on. This is the book for them. And maybe for you. Sallis's stories appear in magazines tiny and large. To have all these stories gathered in one place is a treat not to be missed.

A City Equal to My Desire is a collection of stories harking back to James Sallis's early days as a writer, although all were produced after 1998. The book's front and back cover blurbs suggest that the collection is primarily crime and mystery fiction, which is where Sallis is best known today, but many of the tales are speculative fiction and include pieces published in Asimov's, Fantasy and SF, and Talebones.

The best of the crime stories here is "Drive," which Sallis later expanded into a novella of the same name that I believe is one of the best noir thrillers ever written. For me, however, the true gems in the collection are the speculative stories, especially "Roofs and Forgiveness in the Early Dawn," about an unusual alien invasion, "Pitt's World," which tells the story of a survivor of a spaceship crash, and "Telling Lives," about a writer who has discovered a niche for himself in writing biographies of everyday people. Another great story is "Day's Heat," which features an unusually close set of triplets and which ties with "Roofs and Forgiveness..." for my choice of personal favorite.

Wonderful characters and character interactions are Sallis's strengths, but we also find lovely language and beautiful imagery here. His characters are alive and his tales stir both the emotions and the imagination. I highly recommend them.