Bloodchild and Other Stories

A stunning collection that shows some of the best writing from Butler that I've read to date. Butler has some of the best prose I know, but it's not the type that would dazzle anyone. It's much more due to her unique precision and economy of language that makes her works approachable, while at the same time letting a more seasoned reader marvel that no word is unnecessary or misplaced. Truly, I believe that Butler could write about a dull and amorphous ball of cells, and not only do so compellingly, but while somehow finding the humanity and emotion within. Several of these stories moved me to the point of tears.

Butler, who herself admits a dislike for writing short stories, is nonetheless more than capable of synthesizing a story down to it's most essential parts, stories that could easy be longer, novel-length works. It's impressive to read any collection and have an instinct to wish that the stories were longer.

The standouts in this collection, for me, were the tile story Bloodchild and Speech Sounds, both of which won awards when they were first published. What sets this collection apart though, is that while some of the stories didn't match these two in terms of quality, none of them dragged the collection down. None of them felt like filler, which seems to be an almost legal requirement for half of the stories included in any collection or anthology.