Mourning Cloak I think is one of the weaker stories in the book. Mourning Cloak: A tale of an aging prostitute and her bio-engineered wings. It makes Monsters one of the more sombre, but touching stories in the book. But what Thomas does well is humanise the alien creatures, gives the victims a voice, even when they can't speak English. Much of the horrifying things that take place in this story are done in the name of religion and cultural morality. I kind of get the impression that Thomas was channeling his inner disdain for religion here. But as he works on his new patient, he'll learn that sometimes the true monsters are family. Dr Fleck has been assigned to its reconstructive surgery. It's been brutally mutilated and is in terrifying agony. Monsters: A strange horrifying alien creature has just been wheeled into the Punktown hospital. Sometimes things hide in the shadows, crawl out of the dark, that no-one is ever able to understand. It's also a good reminder to the reader of how strange the world of Punktown is.

A slow burning body horror piece that goes into high octane panic when shit hits the fan.

But he's also feeling lonely, and by the end of the night he will care about that girl. He just wants to get his business meeting over and done with. is a poster hung up all over the Punktown train station. The action sequences are well paced and fun to read and the ending has a kind of 'Here we go again' theme which I quite liked.ĭo you know this girl?. Fast, schlocky and gritty, Clone Johnny is an arsehole but an engaging arsehole nonetheless with his own brand of rugged charisma. This opening story reads much like a 80's sci-fi movie. Except the clone isn't going down quietly. He's a clone of Johnny and now the doctors want to put him to sleep like a dog. Johnny Pharoah: Johnny is a hitman who's just woken up from a medically induced coma. Like with a lot of anthology series, I'll go through each story individually and give you a quick capsule review. Voices from Punktown is an anthology series much in the vein of the original Punktown and Punktown: Third Eye series and has the same overall theme: short stories using the city planet of Paxton AKA Punktown as a backdrop. I've pretty much read nearly all of Thomas's work to date, but I've found his Punktown work to be the superior in terms of design, narrative, characters and tone. In fact it was on the recommendation of Mieville himself on the cover of Deadstock that got me onto reading Thomas's work in the first place. Next to China Mieville, Jeffrey Thomas was the other gateway writer that got me into New Weird fiction.

Punktown by Jeffrey Thomas