How did I not review this already? Maybe it wasn't up here when I read it, back in the early part of the year? Who the hell knows. I blurbed it, though, and have talked about it incessantly, so, if you know me, you probably already know how much I liked it. (Sorry, Laura and Gigi, but five stars is for those books I love so much I want to marry them and, although I can see dating CoW for a very long time, I just can't see it being forever and ever.)

If you're a fan of Night Gallery or H.P. Lovecraft or the short fiction of Stephen King or Neil Gaiman, this book is for you. If you like discovering new authors, this book is for you. If you have always been slightly leery of the Big Pink, this book is for you. If you miss the Portland that was actually weird and not hipster/Portlandia weird, this book is for you. If you like literary fiction but think genre fiction is "lesser", this book is out to prove you mistaken. Honestly, unless you only read non-fiction or Christian fiction, there is probably something here for you to enjoy. (There's even a graphic story for those who prefer their fiction illustrated and laid out in panels and at least one story that could probably easily be expanded into a YA novel.) Just read it. If the story you start with isn't working for you, try another. Out of the 30 entries in this collection, I can almost guarantee that at least one of them will make you emit "happy book noise". ( )

Bought for me as a present by a relative who was visiting Portland, so I had no preconceptions about the place at all. Now I know it's basically a gate to another dimension! Some really nice work in here. My standouts were
How I Got This Job - Brian Reid - for the comedy. Lines like 'Police brutality or not, Santa is in need of a good ass-kicking' are worth the price of admission.
Yay by Bradley K. Rosen for the Ray Bradbury-esque power of disturbed childhood memories.
The Heft of Ashes by Kirsten Larson - short stories at their best, spare, beautiful depiction of grief
Letters to the Oregonian in the Year 30,000 BC by Mark Russell - hilarious
So glad I was given this, and I wanna go to Portland! ( )

It’s nice to see all the references to Portland and its quirkiness spread throughout these shorts stories, and editor Gigi Little assembled a collection with a broad range, so there is likely something that will strike a chord with anyone. As a whole though, I found the quality level of the writing to be too uneven, sometimes overwrought, and amateurish. There were some notable exceptions, easily 4 stars on their own:

Aromageddon, by Jason Squamata
The Mind-Body Problem, by Susan DeFreitas
The Color Off the Shelf, by Karen Munro … my favorite
Vampire, by Justin Hocking
The Fixer: a Serial – 1 – The Duchess, by Sean Davis
Letters to the Oregonian from the Year 30,000 BC, by Mark Russell ( )

You have to know Portland, I think, to appreciate all of the fun in this book, but that is enough fun that you don't have to know Portland to enjoy this collection of stories that hew pretty closely to the type of stories that appeared in the magazine "Weird Tales" in its heyday. ( )