The Infernal Republic by Marshall Moore Review

Title: The Infernal Republic

Author: Marshall Moore

My Rating: 4/5

Part of a series? No

Genre(s): Fantasy, Anthology. 

Description/Blurb:

A lonely demon in a remote corner of Hell oversees a divine but rigged typing contest. A sentient house in San Francisco decides to become vacant once again... by any means necessary. A supernatural first date in Hong Kong goes hysterically, horribly awry. How did this become my life? And... now what? These questions recur throughout The Infernal Republic as a cast of characters you'd either love or run from confront the unlikely and surmount the impossible. The Infernal Republic is the new collection of short fiction from Marshall Moore, the author of The Concrete Sky, Black Shapes in a Darkened Room, and An Ideal for Living. 

My review: 
I know that I've reviewed Marshall Moore's work before (feel free to take a look at the review for Bitter Orange) so I did go into this book with a couple of preconceptions as I did enjoy reading his novel Bitter Orange but I've tried to only consider this collection of short stories in this review.  

Each of the stories in this collection could easily stand alone on their own merit. Although they vary in length with some being just over a page long while others are long enough to be divided into chapters, they were all well written (and edited). The stories flowed easily with no hang ups on grammar or unusual word choices and each story felt drastically different from the last.

This collection does have quite a few dark undertones to it and would probably be best appreciated by somebody with a slightly dark or twisted sense of humour. Some of the studies (betting on whether somebody will commit suicide and a superpower that can mess with the less than sanitary bodily functions are just some of the milder examples in my opinion) could be considered bad taste or offensive, but as you can tell by the rating I still found this collection perfectly enjoyable as a whole.

The only reason I didn't give this 5/5 was because not all of the stories were to my taste and I found myself wanting to skip over a couple, such as the one where a man hears a ‘shark’s’ voice in his head, it did have an interesting concept and I'm sure others would name it as their favourite story in the collection but it just wasn't the sort of story I would choose to read if it wasn't in the collection.