Thirty Days Later

The 15 brief stories in this follow-up anthology to Twelve Hours Later (2015) are, for the most part, more interesting for their aspirations than their execution. Each is broken into two separately titled parts, with events in the second part unfolding 30 days after those in the first. Anthony Francis, in “The Fall of the Falcon/The Rise of the Dragonfly,” uses that interval to work a crafty time-travel paradox into a futuristic tale of “infectious Foreign gearwork” run amok. But in the majority of stories, authors use the break to elide details that would have more fully fleshed out the bare bones of their narratives. Some contributors build up reader expectations with intriguing ideas—buildings on the moon that nobody but a scientist under the influence looking through his telescope can see in Michael Tierney’s “The Light of the Moon/The Shadows of the Moon”; a clandestine society of those with extrasensory sight in Emily Thompson’s “Courting Adventure/Adventure Realized”—only to end their underdeveloped stories abruptly. The brevity of these stories works to the disadvantage of their ambitions. (June)