About
Traffic is piling up, and strange things are headed your way in this new story collection by World Fantasy Award-winning author Tobias S. Buckell. In these twenty-seven stories you’ll find inhabitants of a small town who won’t vaccinate against a zombie plague, a lone sentry keeping motorists from stumbling into something ancient and evil, a man who puts stranded ghosts to rest, an ex-soldier traveling the seas who trades his new life of hardship for a return to swords and blood, and many more tales of speculative fiction.
Buckell’s fertile imagination is on display in Shoggoths in Traffic and Other Stories as he comments on edgy issues of injustice and offers a thorny path to discover the human heart and all the strange things humans do. All the while, he keeps you looking over your shoulder, waiting for rush hour to end.
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Praise
“I love, love, love reading Tobias Buckell’s work. It’s funny, it’s evocative, it’s subversive.”
— Levar Burton, Levar Burton Reads
“World Fantasy Award winner Buckell delivers a collection of speculative shorts that are both timely and timeless. These 24 subversive, bite-sized pieces explore an array of settings and tones and excel in convincing readers to look at the world from new perspectives . . . Most captivating are the stories that offer unique spins on current events: the pandemic response is turned on its head in “A Different Kind of Place” when a zombie outbreak forces the residents of a small town to debate whether or not to put up a wall or get a vaccine to protect themselves. And in “The Alien from Verapaz,” ICE raids a day care to take in the children of an alien superhero, El Fantastico. Buckell shows his chops in a range of subgenres with a keen focus on diversity and humor. Even the busiest readers will find it easy and worthwhile to take a few minutes out of their day to dip into this collection.”
— Publishers Weekly
“An enigmatic cover heralds the best start ever to riveting storytelling. Opening with ‘A Different Kind of Place,’ a zombified San Fontaine and fuckwit antivaxxers, you quickly get Tobias S. Buckell’s distinct voice in subversive text that’s also a curiosity. Shoggoths in Traffic and Other Stories is the darkest, the most fun Black writing you’ll ever read. Buckell draws from his Caribbean roots in ‘Spurn Babylon’ and steps the reader into a strong sense of place inside an ancient slave ship with its black characters questing for a new future. . . A third into the collection, you know how much you love this shit. This book is ace. It’s ribboned with Patreon deliciousness and titillating stories from an award-winning author who dexterously borrows from the everyday to slip the reader into other worlds and the occult. Buckell is knowledgeable in a nerdy sort of way as he tackles racism, vaccination, otherness, togetherness, even deadness . . . with a diverse cast of orphans, single mothers, communities, immigrants, taxi drivers, shamans, entities in the city grid, and more.”
— Eugen Bacon, Aurealis Magazine
“Buckell has become a solid fixture in the genre, one whose byline always guarantees stimulating reading. Curiously, to my mind, he’s kind of a transgenerational figure, with some of his roots and attributes harking back to the pre-internet modes of the field, and some of his concerns and presentations resonating more with the twenty-first century lineaments of commercial fantastika. Really, I think we get the best of both worlds with Buckell’s writing: respect and reverence for the cream of the classics, with an au courant hotline to the zeitgeist of 2021 . . . His current collection features over two dozen tales . . . Buckell uses his Caribbean heritage to good effect in many of these stories, invigorating our genre with worldviews and characters and cultural talismans not often deployed before now. He is equally adroit whether depicting vulnerable and gentle folks, or outright antiheroes. And his prose style is clean and uncluttered, yet not lacking low-key poetry . . . Ultimately, this collection reveals a true craftsman of the field whose tales exhibit both professional pride of construction and deeply felt personal responses to the demands, challenges, seductions and puzzlements of our glorious universe.”
— Paul Di Filippo, Locus Magazine
“Shoggoths in Traffic and Other Stories is a collection of twenty-four short fantasy stories from best-selling author Tobias Buckell. His stories are not just of wizards, dragons, and zombies, even though there are a lot of zombies. He uses the fantasy genre to tell a more complex story. Calling on his experience as a biracial immigrant, Buckell uses his writing to express his disdain for injustice and discrimination. Many of his stories offer commentary on current social ills, including attitudes about race, immigration, belonging, and even vaccines. Buckell’s stories are wildly entertaining and imaginative, as well as edgy and thought-provoking. This is a wonderful short story collection for any fantasy fan, especially those who prefer literature that engages in social critique.”
— San Francisco Book Review
”One of the things I enjoy about Buckell’s work is that he is unpredictable, so each new story is completely unexplored territory. This is a collection of two dozen stories, which range in subject matter from some very odd takes on the zombie theme, a storehouse of the spirits of serial killers, some reasonably standard fantasy, to strange powers and superheroes. Some are deadly serious, some tongue in cheek. There is science fiction and fantasy and even some horror. I had only read a couple of them previously so this was a real treat as they come from anthologies, small presses and magazines, and online publishing sites. The title story is probably my favorite but thy are almost all of such uniform quality that it is hard to pick out exceptions. It’s also fairly long for a collection, so you’ll get more than your money’s worth.”
— Critical Mass
“Buckell improves by an order of magnitude with each story he tells.”
— SF Reviews