Joseph W. Miles' story collection Machinations is subtitled "11 tales of death and despair", and that's just what you get: lots of death, lots of sadness, and in contrast, the odd uplifting ending.

Quickly skipping over the worn clichés trotted out in a couple of stories (although The Donor has such a great set-up: an insurance salesman asking far more questions than are really necessary, that I was really disappointed with how it turned out. That story could have gone to such interesting places...), the contributions that really stood out from the others for me were The Bali Mynah - Julie's new pet is a talking bird that has some strange things to say; and The Time Traveler - a slightly convoluted story about a girl chasing a killer that ends with a clever take on future predictions.

Joseph Miles can write, that's obvious enough from reading just a few pages of Machinations. His prose is polished, atmospheric and often literary in style. However, I found this style was not always backed up by substance. Many of the tales in this collection are very pretty, but with hardly any story behind the frontage. Perhaps I felt a little let down because I don't consider a description of a death to be a story, in the traditional sense of the word - and that's what a great many of these collected pieces are, little more than people passing through and passing away. Don't get me wrong: even at their least impressive, these stories are still likely to be a whole sight better than much of the fiction offerings around today, but it's precisely because the author can write well, that I felt the reader deserved more. I'd say he's one to watch.

Machinations is available now as an e-book and paperback.