Hellhole: An Anthology of Subterranean Terror

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I love anthologies. I can’t stress that enough. I used to hate short stories and the very notion of an anthology was wasted breath, but I got over that around the same time I actually read an anthology of shared world stories ‒ the shared world was the Thieves’ World as edited by Robert Lynn Aspirin ‒ and realized that short stories could be as refreshing and exciting as a novel. The rub had been, apparently, that I hadn’t read any good short stories, or very few in any event. I thrilled over my pulp favorites, like Fritz Leiber, H.P. Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard, but otherwise I found few tales were worth the telling as far as I was concerned.

I wanted the depth, you see. I wanted characters that had life to them and had back stories and emotions and a history, with other characters that went beyond a sentence explaining that Bill and Bob did not get along very well and never had. To be fair, those stories probably existed, but I was addicted to comic books at a young age and was used to getting backstory by the bucket load. All I had to do was look over my previous issues to see all that had happened between the Fantastic Four and Doctor Doom. Short stories? Pfeh! Why bother?

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