Second paragraph of third story (“Last Chapter”):

Jebediah Cole came mostly from a place of fiction; imagination touched by the hand of experience, and peppered with a dash of wistful desire. A pastiche of the many strange and dodgy people Maurice once had the misfortune to know. An ex-armed-forces, ex-law-enforcement, leather-faced, battle-worn bounty hunter; he was a solid, deliberate, hulk of a man. Despite his rough edges, arrogance, and sexist attitude — and the fact that he was really little more than a walking cliché —his readers seemed to find the bloke endearing. His fans clamoured to hear more.

I’ve been zooming through my stash of New Zealand fantasy books acquired in 2020 with some disappointment at the rather unoriginal generic secondary world settings, but this one made me sit up and pay attention: these are almost all tales of fantastic intrusion, where the normal world of Wellington, which is realized in rich detail, becomes the unwilling host of something or some things more weird and awful. Most of the stories are very short (thirteen of them in 180 pages), so each basically represents one idea developed as far as it will go. There are a few recurrent themes – manipulative older men, ex-boyfriends named Joshua – but overall I was impressed by the number of different twists that Wood was able to put on a basic structure. Rather a delight. You can get Dark Winds Over Wellington here.

(Posting this early so that New Zealanders will see it.)

This was the shortest unread book of those I had acquired in 2020. Next on that pile, indeed on all three of my 2020 piles, is Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped, by Felicity Williams.