The Best of Michael Marshall Smith

This collection took me a while to get through. It’s huge, hefty, positively fat. It’s something that certainly works for books in a nicer way than it does for people, but still for this specific reader, it’s a turn off. Then again, if any book has a right to be fat, it’s a best of collection. Especially by an author as excellent as Michael Marshall Smith.
In his case, the page count denotes not the dearth of discipline, not a lamentable tendency for verbosity, but a sheer immense quality of work. All these stories can easily be described as best. In fact, as of now I’m yet to read a MMS (or any his pseudonymed work) and now find it worthy of the inclusion in best as a category or a collection. I did read some of the stories included in this volume before, but even those were a pleasant reread. Most of them were new to me, though. New and great and difficult to put down. Thank goodness for kindles, because unputdownable 544 page book is an entirely different proposition.
So is 544 pages too long for a best of? Is it still selective at all? Well, yes, if you consider that MMS’ career spans 30 years and, as of the time of the boo’s afterword, 96 published short stories. But here are some of the most impressive things about his short stories…they usually take no more than two of three days to write and they are usually written on demand, as in prompted by publishers, solicited for themed anthologies, etc. In fact, in general, MMS is a highly commercial author, specializing in the most marketable of genres and hopping them with ease, simply shifting gears, changing his name and presto….there it is, another fun adventure.
I admit to not having read as many of them as I would have liked, because despite his commercial appeal, our library doesn’t seem to have any of his ebooks. But in an ideal world I would very much like to. Because I absolutely love his writing. The man is a natural born storyteller, he writes so vividly, so realistically that his tales play put cinematically on the silver screen of the mind. Absolutely first rate character development too, with these complex, flawed and completely believable individuals populating his worlds. And the imagination on that guy…the plots he comes up…it’s a thing of beauty. There's also his awesome ability to pivot the story on a dime and turn it and its protagonists into something much darker and scarier. And all of it is wildly original to boot.
In fact, the only story in the entire book that reminded me of something (and strongly) is The Gist which read almost like a bookish pastiche to The Story of The Late Mr. Elvesham, but then it’s followed up by a terrific and terrifically original stab at metafiction where the author shows himself interact with the characters he created. So clever. And such an excellent reminder of MMS’ creativity and ability to pivot in any direction and excel. Nowhere is it more obvious than toward the end, with a crazybutitworks juxtaposition of a nightmarish fecal driven apocalypse (yes, seriously) and a subtle poignant tale of dealing with death of parents. Yes, the man can do it all. Even the ways he takes on genre standards (zombies, cosmic, etc.) is wildly original.
So yes, I’m not even going to try to name my favorites, there were too many. If ever there was a fat book worth the time, it’s this one. Mind you, it might not be for everyone. It’s very dark, with barely a story (Seventeenth Kind)or two to change things up. It’s dark often in a bleak depressing way, in a way that someone who glimpsed behind the gaudily colored curtain of positivity and cheer and beheld the true state of things might write. For me, it’s a major attractor. That level of realism. Might not be for some. But for fans of literary dark psychological fiction spanning a gamut of genres, this will work awesomely. Because that’s what this collection is, in a word, awesome. Even despite the author’s seeming inability to write a nonsmoking character or his lamentable passion for felines. Still awesome. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.