In times as hard-pressed as these, it’s enough to be entertained without arduous social commentary or unconventional storytelling. And it’s when you get back to basics that we see the true masters shine.
Not just any master, but Word Horror Grandmaster and TEN-TIME Bram Stoker Award Winner Joe R. Lansdale recently released the 43-page nugget Shooting Star through his publishing company Pandi Press. I received my copy with the Night Worms June subscription box, along with a rather promising anthology of short stories.
The man behind Bubba Ho-tep penned this novella as an homage to “old classic science fiction.” Indeed, what we have here could easily be the script for an episode of the Twilight Zone. In Shooting Star, drifter John Shaw hitches a train ride to nowhere in particular with his buddy. John is in the middle of winning over a foxy blonde when a burning gob of metal falls out of the sky and slams into the train. The collision kills the majority of the passengers and crew but leaves our protagonist, his buddy, and the blonde relatively uninjured. When John and the other survivors stumble out of the train and discover an alien spaceship, they see something that makes them run for the hills — and their lives.
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