Review of Darkling Dreams by Addison Smith
Addison Smith’s Darkling Dreams (Shacklebound Books, 2024) is a collection of drabbles–stories of exactly 100 words. The themes in these stories are often dark and sci-fi, but they show an incredible mastery of the drabble format in their breadth and scope of approaches to this tricky length.
I was familiar with some of Smith’s drabbles through other publications, like the devastatingly perfect “The Hikaru Defense Project” included here, in which a likely clone, one of a long line, is brought into service. Other stories in this collection were new to me. I particularly liked “Three Dates with an Alien Brood Mother” for the way in which the three dates provided the structure of the story, each summed up in very few words. “Transmogrification and You” was a drabble in list format that told the story in faint hints about what had led to the need for this list. I also loved the space mermaids of “With Hands of Grappling Steel,” and I found “For Our First Date I Dress in Red” contained a surprising twist that I didn’t expect. Pulling off a twist in a drabble is a hard task indeed, but this story nailed it!
If you enjoy reading stories that are quite brief but leave you thinking about them long after you’ve read them, check out Darkling Dreams when it comes out on Friday, February 23rd!
The author provided me an advance copy of this collection in exchange for review consideration.
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