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I am gloomy as I write this review because I appreciate the effort, high spirits and enthusiasm that created such a grand looking volume. The whole thing took a year and was cooked up by CriminOlly, the ever affable Booktuber (in the UK), and author & Booktuber Troy Tradup (in the USA I think). I don’t wanna trash their trash! I really wanted to love this.

But.

Announcing that your book is trash is kind of like saying that your book is an unfunny comedy. Hmmm, why, then, would I read it? Well it must be that the Awesome Trash in this big anthology of 34 all-new stories is the fun, excellent, gobsmacking kind of trash that some bottom-feeding readers would hurtle towards with expressions of murderous glee.

Unfortunately as I read up to page 145 and then stopped, the glee kept draining away along with my will to live. I had to conclude, very sadly, that this trash was not awesome. It was trash. That part of the description is accurate. I think the phrase so-bad-it's-good might be used here, but no, they weren't.

One after another, these brief, rabidly overwritten tales deal in the gruesome fates of horrible people, random supernatural outbursts, violence that ends ironically, and I thought � I am getting a case of déjà vu here. And not in a good way. And it came to me :



Yes, all this stuff used to turn up in the Pan Book of Horror Stories, a series that damaged my psychology as a weedy adolescent. Now The Pan Books started really well, for ten years they were truly trashily awesome, but then they then went down down downhill faster than a slalom skiier, and even though they were slender volumes, the editor appeared to be collecting many barrels to scrape for the stories he allowed into print. Garbology is just like stories from the last ten years of the Pan Books.

So� I would like to give 5 stars for the whole enterprise, from booktubing to creating a handsome physical whopping anthology, it’s a great thing to have done.

Two stars for the content though, and I am being generous.