Knife Fight and Other Struggles
By David Nickle
David Nickle doesn’t believe in holding anything back. With this new collection he takes the reader on a series of wild rides at manic velocity, careening through a dozen explosive and surreal stories that dip into fantasy, science fiction, and horror, exploring alternative worlds and crazy futures.
There’s no typical Nickle story, but the novella “Wylde’s Kingdom” is one of his liveliest and most imaginative. It begins with the kidnapping of a former eco-warrior reality-TV star, who is immediately liposuctioned and then dragged from his Brazilian home just before a giant, never-ending superstorm destroys the east coast of North and South America.
That’s all in the first few pages, before our hero is shot full of steroids and amphetamines and sent to the bottom of the ocean in a combat diving suit to fight a pack of giant squid. The Discovery Channel will never be the same.
Alex on SF 