Coins of Chaos

Ghost Roads #1.1 - Train Yard Blues

by Jennifer Brozak (editor), Kelly Swails (contributor), Glenn Rolfe (Contributor)

During and after the great depression they were traded for food, sex, shelter, and power. Twenty of the seemingly ordinary nickels carved with dark representations of world evils and imbued with magical powers that transformed the deliciously macabre bits of lost art into carriers of death, destruction, and ill luck.

Where these coins go, so does his will. Each coin is imbued with his malice and a desire for destruction. With each life ruined... the Carver's life goes on. Seventeen stories tell the tale of the Carver's legacy: coins designed for beauty morphed into catalysts of pain.

Genres: Urban Fantasy, Anthologies, Short Stories, Horror, Fantasy

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2013

Reviews

[Dev · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like this is a pretty standard anthology. The idea behind it was neat and I liked how all of the coins looked a little bit different and did different things. It was a nice framing device to allow the authors to be creative with their stories while still fitting them into a larger framework and tying them all together. I wouldn't say any of the stories in this anthology were necessarily bad but a lot of them were just average to me. There's a lot of what are in my opinion very over-used horror cliches [like cannibalism in general, wishing for something but then it backfires on you and a friend/relative dies, always the wives and girlfriends and mothers getting killed etc etc]. I bought this anthology because Seanan McGuire has a story in it and, as always, hers was definitely the best one. Although in this case she may be playing with a bit of an unfair advantage since it is a spin-off from one of her other books so I already have background knowledge about her characters and their world.

[Melani · Rating 2 out of 5]

Middling collection of short stories, but I'll be honest it was the framing device that really bothered me. I think the idea of building a collection of stories around a series of haunted/cursed coins is a good one. However, there's giving authors some framing for their stories and then forcing a story to fit into your framing device, and I believe this collection did the second. Brozek followed each story up with a little snippet that forced a specific view point on the stories and it became repetitive. In addition, these little snippets often directly contradicted something from the original story in order to make the story fit into the mold that Brozek wanted it to.

As for the stories themselves, I mean some were good, most were mediocre. I don't particularly enjoy reading about someone being cursed with bad luck simply because they got unlucky so I found the stories where the coins brought out the darker nature of the characters to be more enjoyable. There were also stories where I could see that this is what the author was attempting, but didn't succeed. Meh.

[Roberta R. (Offbeat YA) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mini blurb: Seventeen hobo nickels altered by a mysterious Carver wreak havoc in the lives of those who end up with one of them, or feel compelled to pick one up.

***

Rated 2.5 really.

As it's often the case, this collection called to me because Seanan McGuire has a story in it (set in the Ghost Roads universe, too, which I love dearly), but on the whole, I was a bit bored - not to mention, a few of the stories are set in the early 1900s, which isn't an era I enjoy reading about (other were a lot more recent though, like from the '90s). The framing device could have been simple but effective, without the Carver (Brozek, I suppose) inserting himself in the narrative via a series of afterwords that sometimes contradict a point in the stories they are attached to (or proceed to "tell" what the stories are supposed to "show" - or to add something that isn't there). I also found it a bit jarring that some of the coins are said to be always cold to the touch, but one is described as unusually warm - maybe giving the authors some basic rules to work by wouldn't have been a bad idea. As for the content, some of the stories are about the coin giving the characters bad luck (yawn), others about them bringing forth the protagonists' inner darkness (much better). The best of the bunch (along with McGuire's - yes, I'm biased 🙂) was The Value of a Year of Tears and Sorrow by Jason Andrew - complex and with a twist I couldn't see coming. Then again, on a side note, too many women were harmed in the making of this book...

Note: definitive review (I don't have enough to say to justify writing a full-length one later, and of course I don't plan to reread this book; also, due to time commitments, I've decided not to write full-length reviews anymore for short stories, novellas and anthologies, except in special cases or unless they're part of a series).

[Brok3n · Rating 2 out of 5]

Train-Yard Blues

First, a disclaimer. I am not really reviewing Coins of Chaos. I read only the preface and one story, Train-Yard Blues, by Seanan McGuire. For most of 2022 I have been engaged on the project of reading all of McGuire's published fiction. This was, when I read it yesterday evening, the last story of McGuire's I knew of that I had not yet read. My project is not finished, however, because last night at 21:08 she released her Oct-2022 Patreon reward, the story "How to Bake a Pie". Of course I knew that would be coming, so I knew last night that I wasn't really finished yet. But I will be, this evening, until I come across another story that I somehow missed.

So, Train-Yard Blues. It is a Ghost Roads story, that is, it is a story about Hitchhiking Ghost Rose Marshall. I like Rose a lot, so I had high hopes for this. However, it let me down. Rose gets one of the coins mentioned in the book title and a bunch of dangerous spectral thingies chase her around on a train. There is almost no plot aside from Rose getting chased, and we don't get much of her sparkling personality.

Blog review.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good collection of stories about cursed coins, all interlocking. Most of the stories were good, though some were better than others.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Silver and Copper, Iron and Ash ★★
The Price of Serenity ★★★
Vinegar Pie ★★★
The Fall of Jolly Tannum ★★★★
Spendthrift ★★★★
Incubus Nickel ★★★★
In His Name ★★★
Lies of the Flesh ★★
Train Yard Blues ★★★★
Skull of Snakes ★★
Searching for a Hero ★★
Something in the Blood ★★
The Value of a Year’s Worth of Tears and Sorrow ★★★
Definitely Dvořák ★★★
Justice in Five Cents ★★★★
Tithes ★★★
With One Coin for Fee: An Invocation of Sorts ★★★

I picked this up for Train Yard Blues, as I'm working my way through the Ghost Roads portion of the Incryptid universe by Seanan McGuire. As a collection, I think as this was fine. I enjoyed most of the stories, and I thought a lot of the authors did really interesting things with the framing device - but the framing device is where I had a bit of a problem.

I wish that The Carver didn't have such an overbearing presence in the book. I think the prologue and epilogue were fine, but the little outros at the end of each of the stories was a little much. I also wish that some of the stories had had a bit more page time - they might have been more successful if they were. But otherwise, it was fine.

[Martin Livings · Rating 4 out of 5]

DISCLAIMER - I have a story in this book. But that doesn't change the fact that I loved it. Vicious little stories, small and sharp and malicious as the coins they're based on. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Kat]

I got this to read exactly one short story, Train Yard Blues by Seanan McGuire. It was ok - so short there wasn’t time for much of anything. I’m not a horror fan, and as I don’t recognize any other authors in this collection, I doubt I’ll be coming back to it.