Book Review: LISTEN TO THE SIGNAL (Short Stories, Vol 1) by Rob Dircks
If your busy lifestyle is leaving you with little time to enjoy the speculative fiction that you love, allow me to suggest a remedy: short story collections and anthologies. Such books require a low time commitment, and if a few days — or weeks — go by between the moments you manage to carve out for reading, recalling details isn’t a struggle. Reading shorts, though, can still tease the imagination, challenge a preconception, and let you explore a tiny slice of another life — maybe even another life form. And in that realm, you could do far, far worse than treating yourself to Rob Dircks’ Listen to the Signal: Short Stories, Vol 1. Collecting work from the author’s short fiction podcast of the same name, Listen to the Signal is a delightful bounty of fun ideas, clever twists, and endings that leave just enough to the reader’s own imagination to beguile a tedious wait for a doctor or car wash or turn at the DMV — or, my personal choice for short fiction, as bedtime stories for grown ups. Although, let me add, there is nothing here that, say, a mother should hesitate to let a young’un read, especially in her attempts to cultivate in the kid a love for her favorite genre (i.e. this is a precocious and kid-friendly collection).
