All Your Friends Are Here by M. Shaw

All Your Friends Are Here Reviews

• 
  Becky Spratford

  Reading for review in the October 2024 issue of Library Journal
  
  
  Exciting new voice-- already Wonderland Award winner. Stories all have 5 star opening lines. Readers will be hooked from the first sentence. Narrators of each story are engaging but in different ways.
  
  Three Words That Describe This Book: Provocative, Slightly Askew, Ominous
  
  More notes coming. I need to let this one sit. The stories are there to make you squirm but you can't stop reading-- you don't want to. That was cool.
  
  All stories take reality and twist them into something weird. Very accessible for how "Weird" it all is.
  
  Also and this is a sign of a special collection-- every story has a GREAT opening line. engaging, proactive, hook you and wants you to keep going. And all narrators are direct and engaging.
  
  The stories are all different and yet untied by Shaw's voice-- also the promise that the title brings a connection-- a refrain (or version of it) that appears in each story, a phrase that should invoke comfort and joy, but in Shaw’s hands, it gets twisted into something much more unsettling.
  
  Some story notes.
  
  Ready Player (N + 1) is a novelette original to this collection proclaimed as a repose to the toxic masculinity of Ready Player One. It delivers! Even better than I expected. Not going to give more than that. But very well done.
  
  A few others to highlight--
  
  "Roots in the Ground" opens the collection. with its creepy, unsettling woods/mountain setting set the tone for what is to come. It is perfectly placed.
  
  One Long Staircase-- this one was dark but also awesome. the 500 Richest men on earth meet with the aliens and make a deal.
  
  The Only Friend You Ever Need-- great overall example of Shaw's imagination and style. Our world but with dangerous monsters that appeared to manageable but it all changes with the narrator and "Inillustrable Girl," Just read it
  
  Apartémon-- a new game where you make new friends with a sentient AI running it.
  
  All stories seem to be set in Ohio which is a very blah, boring state-- that enhanced the "weird" as well.
  
  Reminded my of Philip Fracassi's No One is Safe collection-- which I LOVED.
  
  Some stories reminded by of T. Kingsolver, others of Josh Malerman, others of Cass Khaw.
• 
  Books For Decaying Millennials

  This is a review of the uncorrected arc provided by the publisher. I am providing an honest review
  This is not a paid review
  -
  I've long been a fan of short story collections, going back to my introduction to the work of Mark Twain byway of anthology of some of his short stories. Short fiction collections are like a
  This was my mindset jumping into All Your Friends Are Here . I just started reading the first story, "Roots in the Ground", when I was struck an image, walking through the wrought-iron gate into a green space, the gate closes with a resounding clang, and when I peer back it's gone, replaced by an enclosing stonewall. At this moment I had just read the first striking turn of events in 'Roots in the Ground".
  "So its going to be like Huh? Okay then"
  I said this audibly while taking a brief moment to pause. I didn't have a premonition per-say, but I got a sense that M.Shaw was about to hit me with some solid stories. What followed was succession of stories, that were diverse in tone and topic but each showcasing shaws transgressive and thought provoking style.
  I'm fighting the urge to go story by story and give little one shot reviews. I'll go so far as to give brief takeaways from a few of my favorites from this collection. A selection that was very hard to narrow down.
  
  "Roots in the ground": Absolutely the best story to begin the collection with. An examination of the way People Grieve and Deal with the loss of loved ones...or don't... Shaw racks across the skin of the reader summoning forth an uncomfortable feeling in the gut and a dread of things beyond our understanding.
  "The Only Friend You'll Ever Need": As a life long comic book fan, this story came across as a intriguing and extremely fresh take on what role meta-humans would play if and how they may relate and c0-exist the general public.
  "Ready Player (N+1)" : A delicious dressing down of the profoundly toxic cis-het-male energy that festers in pop culture and Tech-Space. Also, probably the best response to Ready Player One I've ever read.