Okay, so here's my problem with short story anthologies: they're basically the audiobook equivalent of a sampler platter. Some bites are incredible, some are meh, and you're left wondering if you should've just ordered one full entrée. But 18 hours of commute time is 18 hours, and honestly? This one had enough hits to justify the misses.
Let me back up. I grabbed this for a particularly brutal on-call week where I knew I'd be doing a lot of "hurry up and wait" debugging sessions. Short stories are perfect for that—natural stopping points, no complex plot threads to lose track of when your pager goes off at 3AM. And Writers of the Future has a decent track record for surfacing new talent, so I figured the signal-to-noise ratio would be acceptable.
The Zombie PI Sold Me (No, Really)
Dan Shamble, the Zombie P.I. story? I was NOT expecting that to work. The premise sounds like a joke someone pitched at a bar. But Kevin J. Anderson apparently knows how to write pulpy noir that doesn't take itself too seriously, and Jim Meskimen absolutely runs with it. His voice for Shamble hits this perfect deadpan (pun intended) that made me actually laugh out loud on a packed Caltrain. The guy next to me definitely thought I was losing it.
The time travel story about saving London from a nuclear attack was more my usual speed—solid sci-fi with actual stakes. How to Stop Time plays with similar temporal mechanics, though with way less nuclear tension. And look, the "IRS agent facing the darkest audit" concept is basically bureaucratic horror, which... yeah, that hits different when you're a W-2 employee watching half your RSUs disappear to taxes.
The Meskimen Factor
So this is a family affair—Jim Meskimen, plus Taylor and Tamra Meskimen handling different stories. And honestly? It works way better than I expected. Each narrator brings something different, which helps differentiate the wildly varying tones. You've got dark fantasy butting up against space opera butting up against that weird Key West vampire-dragon-shapeshifting-Chihuahua thing (still processing that one).
Jim's the standout for me. He's got this clean, energetic delivery that adapts well across genres. Character differentiation is solid—you can tell who's speaking without mental gymnastics. I did notice my attention slipping during a couple of the slower-paced stories. Not sure if that's the narration going a bit flat or just the stories themselves dragging, but fair warning if you're listening during your morning zombie commute state.
I bumped it to 1.5x for the middle section and that helped with pacing. Some of these stories could've been tighter.
The New Author Lottery
Here's the thing about "best new voices" anthologies—you're basically buying a lottery ticket. Some of these writers are going to blow up, some will fade into obscurity, and you won't know which is which for another decade. But that's kind of the fun? I found myself making mental notes of a few names to watch.
The diversity of styles is genuinely impressive. The range from hard SF to urban fantasy to whatever genre "death and taxes personified" falls into kept things interesting. I never knew what I was getting next, which is either a feature or a bug depending on your preference.
My main criticism: some stories feel like they're trying too hard to be clever. The "look at this twist!" energy gets a little exhausting after story number seven. But that's a minor gripe in an 18-hour anthology.
Would I Queue This Up Again?
Probably not the whole thing—that's a lot of hours to re-commit. But I'd definitely revisit the Shamble story and a couple of the harder SF pieces. And I'll probably grab Volume 40 when it drops, which I guess means this did its job.
Perfect for: long commutes, gym sessions, any situation where natural stopping points are useful. Skip if: you need deep focus (too much genre-hopping) or a continuous narrative thread to stay engaged.
The ROI on this audiobook is decent if you treat it as a discovery mechanism. You're not going to love every story—that's literally impossible with anthologies—but the hit rate is high enough to make it worth your time. Plus, supporting new authors feels good, even if some of them wrote that Chihuahua story.
(Still thinking about that Chihuahua.)
