Book Review: Around the Dark Dial

A Twilight-zone inspired science fiction short story collection from J.D. Sanderson.

Anthologies and short story collections really are great, aren’t they? I’ve come to enjoy them over the last couple of years, and it’s one of the more unexpected things to come out of my journey back into reading science fiction. Especially from fellow independent authors. There’s a goldmine of great ideas and exceptional work to be read, that all too often doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Around the Dark Dial by J.D. Sanderson is another such work. The book is packed full of emotional, thought-provoking, poignant stories that evoke the classic feeling of something like the Twilight Zone, but through a modern lens.

Blurb

Take a trip around the dark dial with eleven original and thought-provoking short stories that invoke the wonder and mystery of old-time radio dramas. Forget all that you know about modern sci-fi. In Around the Dark Dial, it’s all about the unexpected.

Review

I have to admit, I’m not familiar with the vibe of episodic radio dramas from the 1950s, which is mainly why I made the comparison to the Twilight Zone, which I am a little more knowledgeable about. So I can’t tell you if this short story collection fits in with that, but I feel like I got an inkling of it in some of the more historically set science fiction pieces - particularly in the story Headline, which was all about a reporter uncovering government corruption in the 1950s, or in the really creepy Caller Four.

The collection as a whole gave me the same feeling as when I played the videogame, Control, which was itself inspired by things like Twin Peaks and the Twilight Zone. A lot of the stories in the book focused on the smaller scale, around ordinary people dealing with extraordinary problems. There’s a lot of sci-fi staples like artificial intelligence and the friction of a co-existing android society, akin to something like Detroit: Become Human or the Will Smith I, Robot movie, or even the Million Machine March short from the Animatrix.

There’s also really fantastic first-contact story that evolves over the course of the book, interspersed with the one-shots. It evokes a strong ethereal sense of awe and wonder. I love it when short stories become otherworldly and almost abstract - like the beach aliens at start of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, or anything by Luc Besson, really. This is kind of what I mean when i describe things as “like a John Harris painting”.

One story in particular - Daughter - hit hard, emotionally. As a father to younger kids, I’ve found that I get choked up quite easily when these kinds of storylines pop up. Bravo for that one, it was very powerful.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed Around the Dark Dial, and it gets a high recommendation from me.