I hadn’t read any Tad Williams (though Ivy’s recommended him) until Dave lent me this collection of short stories, Rite. Evidently he’s more of a fantasy author than SciFi which doesn’t bother me. I think my problem with this book was the introductions to each story. I found them annoying and filled with “Aren’t I so clever” type stuff. Which kind of put me off the stories. Also I found that almost every story was just way too long for what it did. Williams talked in one of the introductions about loving language and that’s why he writes, which is fine, but few of the stories really felt like they’d been pruned down to the necessary.
That’s not to say I didn’t like anything about it. The Dark Destructor story was good. I kind of liked the airplane story, it had a good Twilight Zone feel to it. The unicorn story was good. But the Otherland story annoyed me with its fake swearing; the Elric stories weren’t as funny as he thought they were; and the vampire story was too long and he shouldn’t have told the readers it was supposed to be French crusaders because you could see the hasty paint-over job done to make them 13th century Arabs (and it was too long).
