Edited by T. Patrick Rooney and D.G. Sutter
Library of Horror Press
ISBN:978-1461169529
Review by: Ronnie Tucker
Review posted 07/04/2011
Alienology – Tales From The Void is an anthology of 28 Sci-Fi/horror short stories ranging in length from just a couple of pages to a couple of dozen pages for a couple of stories.
The book starts with a short poem which is an ode to the movie Alien then it's off and running with the first short, Devil's Hole. From Devil's Hole through to, and including, The Conservators (which is roughly the half way mark in the book) the stories are all good stuff with equal amounts of alien and gore. I particularly liked Devil's Hole (which is 100% Lovecraftian in nature, and my favourite out of the whole book), Space Freaks, Fuck You ET (good action, but lame ending), Blind Encounter (good Matrix-style idea, but, again, the ending was a bit lacklustre), Salt And Copper (which, like several other shorts, shows how many Sci-Fi authors are terrified of human-eating aliens), Midnight In A Small Town (good 80's B-movie idea, but let down with a saw-it-coming slushy ending), It Came From Outer Space (reminded me of Silent Hill for some reason, and has a nice sick ending), Jacob's Bad Day (another nice idea with a sick ending), Heavenward (one of the better shorts in the last half of the book), and The Fruits Of Incubation was pretty sick too.
The only down side with Alienology is that, in my opinion, it seems that the editors have put all the good stuff in the first half with all the mediocre stuff in the last half so, for me anyway, the last half of the book is a bit of a drag. The majority of the stories all tried to have a twist ending which remind me of either The Twilight Zone, or Outer Limits (no bad thing), but, for reasons unknown, a couple of the shorts just seemed to end. Almost as though the author left it unfinished. Very odd.
All in all though the first 150+ pages were very enjoyable with some nice ideas and kudos to those authors who went for the sicko ending. They're always my favorite.
