Michel and Nieto and all of the authors have done a superb job creating a kaleidoscope of death and dismemberment ... And among these English language wizards, you have several tiny stories in translation. From French to Japanese, there are stories that appear side-by-side in their original language and in English. Michel and Nieto’s choice to showcase these stories in a multi-lingual format adds an extra dimension to the collection: the human experiences of crime are universal ... Tiny Crimes is the perfect book to take with you to any airport, any doctor’s office, any police station...well, anywhere you need to take a break from the world and experience some good stories.
Probably the truest review I can offer of Tiny Crimes is that it is pretty much what you’d expect from a contemporary collection of forty anythings: a handful of them stand out and will not soon be forgotten, but the majority has, or will, fade from this reviewer’s mind ... Some of this scene-driven work succeeds, like Jac Jemc’s routine coffee-shop scenario upended by an obvious and totally haunting surprise. Or Amelia Gray working her comfortable terrain of warped romance via a series of vignettes yoked into meaning by the central theme of their warp. But there is something lost after, say, the fourth consecutive story that exists on the page the way images appear on a screen ... In Tiny Crimes, the pairing of formal constraint and genre expectation yields a few compelling results and a lot of what we might call perfectly capable, if unexciting, flash ... Happily, the standout stories from Tiny Crimes affirm that the brief can still be insidious, and can still haunt the way literature must.
These snippets of crime, madness, and monsters heighten tension and suspense with the brevity of their set-ups, cleverness of word play, and sucker punches of their climaxes ... This volume provides a smorgasbord of inventive, grisly, sinister, and delightfully amusing tales that are perfect for lovers of crime fiction.
