Black Wings: Flight Five

I think S.T. Joshi must have really enjoyed doing the Black Wings of Cthulhu anthology series. Though it seems like the sequence has ended – Black Wings VI emerged in 2017, there’s been no Black Wings VII yet, the volumes in the series tended to come out every 1-2 years (with the series being reliably annual for III to VI), and you don’t keep up that sort of schedule when you also have a swathe of other projects on your plate unless you get a kick out of it.

So far, I’ve found the series hit and miss, but that’s going to be rather inevitable with a series of multi-author anthologies; a collection where you enjoy all of the authors and all of them happen to be to your taste would be a pretty fortunate thing to encounter (unless, that is, you’re the one picking the stories – which might be where the appeal for Joshi lay). I thought the first one was alright, the second and third pretty solid, but didn’t hold onto the fourth. Still, three out of four ain’t bad, so I’ve gotten around to reading the fifth; let’s see if it’s a keeper.