“The time comes when he thinks, ‘I might just as well fall back; there’s no use pushing on. A colored man just can’t make any headway in this awful country.’ Of course, it’s a fallacy. And if a fellow sticks it out he finally gets past it, but not before it has worked considerable confusion in his life.”

Joel Marshall has ambitions to be a great man. He’s a successful caterer, but he wants more. His daughter, Joanna, shares his desire for greatness and she has a talent for both singing and dancing. She’s at a disadvantage due to her skin color, but she thinks that her success could be a way to break down prejudice. Joanna has the double consciousness spoken of by W. E. B. Du Bois, considering herself an American first, and a colored person second.

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This is a collection of 17 horror stories that all take place in the same venue, a music club called The Shantyman in San Francisco. The first story, “What Sort of Rube” by Alan M. Clark sets the stage. In the era of horse-drawn carriages, a sailor is shanghaied outside of a music hall, then shipwrecked on an island of cannibals. He curses the music hall, so presumably, all the bad things that happen in the rest of the stories are a result of this old sailor’s curse.

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Our narrator wakes to find herself locked in a cell with no autobiographical memory. A woman named Molly Southbourne then enters the cell and tells her story. Any time Molly bleeds, a doppelganger appears. Sometimes the doppelganger is nice at first, but they always turn homicidal after a while, so she’s had to kill a lot of clones of herself throughout her life.

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Murderbot is a socially awkward introvert, a genderless cyborg who hacks itself to gain free agency. It’s designed to kill, but it prefers to sit around watching TV instead. Murderbot will stop at nothing to save the humans in its care, though. I found this quite delightful, especially the way most of the humans are nice to Murderbot despite how different it is from them.

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Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, a tenth-century German nun, is the first known female playwright. As you’d expect from a nun, her plays often praise virginity and martyrdom.

I felt the dialogue was rather simple with characters frequently agreeing with each other and repeatedly saying things like, “That’s true.” Since the characters are often either pure good or pure evil, they aren’t very interesting as people. The scenes often feel too short and the plays overall go by quickly without enough time to build up any tension.

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In 1936, six women were murdered in a ritualistic way related to the zodiac. A man (who was father to four of the victims and uncle to two of them), left a testament outlining a plan to murder them. However, he was murdered before they were, and in a locked room no less.

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“Wherever there were people, there were secrets.”

Sisters of the Vast Black mainly takes place aboard a living spaceship crewed by nuns who are more interested in providing medical assistance than converting heathens. However, they’ve recently been assigned a new priest who may want to change their mission.

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