You know, this week I would have taken a bad review...

... with the same equanimity I brought to what seemed like the total collapse of my car's suspension as we drove back from Port Huron (don't worry - part of the plastic on the wheel-well had come loose, and we were able to fix it handily, thanks to the terrifying and barely-legal pocket knife loaned us by a Sarnia convenience store clerk).

But this is not a post about Port Huron, or car trouble, or armed convenience store clerks, or even bad reviews. Matt from ChiZine just pointed me to a very affectionate review of Monstrous Affections, over at Killer-Words.com, by reviewer Monster-Chris, who likes... well, monsters.

I'll quote a bit from the beginning:

A giant Cyclops, a cottaging wendigo, a basement dwelling tar baby, a family of mutants with a terrible gift for love, vampiric miners, a swamp witch... these are just a few of the "monsters" that await in David Nickle's debut short story collection Monstrous Affections (2009). As impressively diverse as this rogue's gallery may seem to be, the truly breathtaking feature of the book is the author's marvelously assured hand as a writer and the deft precision with which he manages to give life to that dark world that often seems to lie just out of our view at any given moment.

And a bit from the end:

Monstrous Affections has already won David Nickle the Black Quill Reader's Choice Award and deservedly so, Monstrous Affections is an absolutely brilliant collection and easily one of the most satisfying books of the past few years and marking David Nickel Nickle as one the most talented writers to emerge from Canada in the last 10 years.

 
And of course I'll link to it, right here.

Thank you, Monster Chris!