Customer Reviews

Sympathy for the Devil

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Please allow me to introduce Sympathy for the Devil, a fine new anthology filled entirely with short stories about the devil... who is, as we all know, a man of style and taste. However, you won't just find the smooth-talking stealer of souls here. In addition to that famous version of His Grand Infernal Majesty, you'll also find funny devils, monstrous devils, abstract devils and strangely realistic ones. Devils scary and not-so-scary, devils who are after children's souls and others going after old men. Devils with a surprising amount of business acumen, and devils who try to get what they want, no matter the cost. There's even one who engages in a competitive eating contest -- the prize is, of course, someone's soul.

Sympathy for the Devil, edited by Tim Pratt, offers up 35 very diverse short stories (and one piece of poetry) which all, without exception, deal with the devil in some form. If that sounds a bit one-tone for an anthology, well -- it is. If ever there were an anthology to nibble at intermittently, reading a story here and there instead of reading the whole book cover to cover, this is definitely it. In that sense, it's almost perfect as a nightstand book -- the only problem being that some of the stories are positively terrifying, and if you happen to have a significant other sharing your bedroom, you might get funny looks when he or she spots your collection of devil stories by the bed.

As Sympathy for the Devil presents an impressive 35 stories, I won't bore you by listing and reviewing all of them individually. Instead, here are a few of my favorites:

* Neil Gaiman is the only author with two stories in the collection. While the first one ("The Price") is nothing special, the second one ("We Can Get Them for You Wholesale") has an excellent build-up that leads to a terrifying finish.

* Elizabeth M. Glover's "MetaPhysics" presents an effective and hilarious way for atheists to refute the Horned One.

* Kelly Link's "Lull" was, for me, the biggest revelation in this anthology. It's a gorgeously weird story that I couldn't stop thinking about for days, and have reread several times since. I plan to read much more by Link very soon.

* Michael Chabon's "The God of Dark Laughter" will have you looking at clowns in an entirely new way.

* China Mieville's "Details" is one of those stories that will insinuate itself into your consciousness. It's hard to forget it after you've read it.

* Jay Lake's "The Goat Cutter" was the single creepiest story in the collection, until I got to...

* Theodore Sturgeon's positively terrifying "The Professor's Teddy Bear".

* Another classic closes out the collection on a strong note: John Collier's "Thus I Refute Beelzy" contrasts enlightened parenting with a decidedly dark finish.

While those are my favorites, there are many other great stories here, including some by well known authors such as Elizabeth Bear, Holly Black, Charles de Lint, Stephen King, Charles Stross and Scott Westerfeld, just to mention a few of the names listed on the cover (also featuring a great illustration by David Palumbo). On the other hand, I would have probably left out at least a handful of stories that bring down the anthology's batting average a bit, but luckily there are enough good and great stories to balance things out.

Tim Pratt has done an excellent job bringing variety to the anthology's dark subject, because Sympathy for the Devil contains something for everyone: horror, fantasy, weird fiction, classics, and even a surprising dose of humor. While not all the stories are equally strong, there's easily enough good material here to justify the cover price.

This is the first title I purchased after receiving my Kindle Fire as a gift. I bought it primarily for several of the included stories, the best of which is "That Hellbounbd Train". The stories I have read have all been entertaining so far and I am satisfied with the book itself. What I am not satisfied with is the lack of a "table of contents" at all. A working TOC would be marvelous, but just a guide to the stories would be an improvement. With this as my first experience with a Kindle format I am not fully happy but my Kindle is great and if this book is ever offered with a working TOC I may just rebuy it.

This collection of short stories by some brilliant authors gives the reader a widely varying look at the devil and the his humorous or nasty temper. A fun little read and a great way to sample a few new authors. Look at the author list, you can not go wrong.

You wouldn't think it would be possible for to put together a collection of short stories about Satan and make it boring, but this book manages to pull off that feat.

Of the three dozen stories in this volume, I found only a few keepers. These included both the selections by Neil Gaiman, particularly "The Price," which featured the welcome change of a cat who was heroic rather than villainous. I also liked the humorous "Metaphysics," about a scientist who uses her knowledge to outwit a demon trolling for souls in Manhattan; "A Reversal of Fortune" applies the same "mortal outwits the devil" idea to an eating contest. "Bible Stories for Adults, No. 21: The Covenant," is about a future society far happier and more virtuous than our own that builds a computer to figure out God's will for humankind. The computer comes up with the Ten Commandments (which have been long forgotten), and which a demonic computer tries to talk it out of revealing. In true Satanic fashion, the anti-Commandment arguments are not only wonderfully clever and plausible, but also reveal just how much better this society is than our own.

Several stories were so boring I couldn't even be bothered to finish them. These included "Lull," which should have been called, "Dull;" "Summon, Bind, Banish," which seems to have something to do with time travel, but I'm not sure of that since it was too long at seven pages(!); and "Faustfeathers," a dumb rip-off of Goethe's epic poem that was supposed to be funny but wasn't.

There is an obligatory offering by Stephen King, which was supposedly inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic, "Young Goodman Brown." However, except for the plot device of the main character meeting the devil while out walking, I saw no similarity between the two stories. Hawthorne's story is so memorable because it's impossible for the reader to tell whether Brown's experiences with the devil and his fellow townsfolk were real, a bad dream, or a hallucination. Whatever they were, they poisoned the rest of his life with paranoia and hostility. King's story, by contrast, is a bland, predictable, and wholly unoriginal piece about a boy who goes fishing, encounters Satan in the woods, and has to run for his life when the devil tries to eat him. It's derivative trash like this that makes me consider King the most overrated horror writer of the last fifty years. (I've read three of his books, so I've earned the right to say that.)

This is another book that should be bought cheap or checked out of a library. Don't waste a lot of money or time on it.