Customer Reviews

The Secret Society of Demolition Writers

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My book club recently had the pleasure of discussing this fabulous collection of short stories edited by writer, Marc Parent. When he presented such famous writers as Anna Quindlen, Sebastian Junger, Aimee Bender and others with the opportunity to write anonomously and "dangerously" they jumped at the opportunity. We not only enjoyed reading and discussing the intriguing and sometimes odd stories; we also took great pleasure in being detectives by trying to figure out who wrote what. It gave us twice the enjoyment for our money. I would highly recommend this for indivivual enrichment or book club discussion.

Marc Parent has edited a collection that is an interesting and unique concept where authors have presented stories to be published that are not in their usual style. So as to avoid public expectations and criticism from hard core fans who are only satisfied with reading more or less the same thing over and over again they have kept their anonymity by not saying which of them wrote which story. Criticism of authors not producing the same old same old certainly does happen. Just read some of the tunnel vision reviews from some Harlan Coben fans of a non Myron Bolitair novels, Alex Cross fans of James Patterson novels, Dr Alan Gregory fans of Stephen White novels and even one of the authors in this collection Michael Connelly when he writes something that doesn't have Harry Bosch is often heavily criticised. So you can understand why being able to submit work in this format of the Secret Society of Demolition Writers would appeal so much to authors.

The problem for Marc Parent is that other than Connelly, Parent has really struggled to come up with anyone else that the casual reader is likely to have come across before, so therefore the whole purpose of the book really means nothing. Also the quality of some of these stories is pretty poor with not really anything happening in a few of stories meaning it is more likely some authors have just submitted work that was rejected by their publishers or they would be ashamed to put their name on. The other problem relates to the good stories like The Safe Man and Good Sport. You have no way of knowing who the author was to check out and enjoy more of their work in the future.

Overall this is a very average collection with only a few good stories. The concept is great and should be tried again, but you need more famous authors and you still need to stick to the traditional editing concept of the rejection of average stories.

The authors were very wise to retain their anonymity. This at least leaves some room for speculation about the specific parentage of the worst stories - in a body of work that was bad to mediocre at best. The concept may have sounded great - but the end result was a total disappointment at every level.

I was dissappointed. Many of the stories were based around sexually explicit themes. I was looking for something more imaginative than that from these authors.