Four Summoner's Tales

So what do you get when you give four authors the following sentence?

"A strange visitor comes to town, offering to raise the townsfolk's dearly departed from the dead-for a price."

You get Four Summoner's Tales, an anthology. This is what authors Christopher Golden and Jonathan Maberry did. They met in July 2011 and were discussing ideas for about plots. It was determined that there are only about seven different plots but it all comes down to...execution. Every person has their own idea about the execution of the story. So why not test that out and see what the results are. The above sentence was given to Mr. Golden, Mr. Maberry and their two fellow authors, Kelly Armstrong and David Liss. They had free rein to whatever concept they wanted in achieving the execution of the story that fit within the parameters of the sentence that they were presented with. Each author came up with their own unique twist on the execution.

It has been a little while since I have read and enjoyed an anthology. When I say enjoyed I mean enjoyed every story and not just one or two. In addition, that the stories featured are ones that you do not have to be familiar with the authors series to like. In fact if you are looking for new authors or have been wanting to check out these ones than you should pick up this anthology. While none of the stories are spooky scary they are still scary in their own ways. Kelley's story reminded me some of the Children of the Corn movie. Whereas Mr. Golden's story was like a Clint Eastwood movie but only if Clint was fighting the undead. Than there was Mr. Liss's story...just imagine The Tudors but instead of the court jester doing the tricks, he was replaced by a necromancer. Finally there is Mr. Maberry's story. I imagine it like Black Hawk Down but the enemies don't die as they are already dead.