Jobs Stranger Than Fiction

By: Ani Fox

Narrated by: Jeremiah Ovard

The average person will spend 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime - unless it kills them first. Or throws them through time, converts them to a soul-sucking, dimension-hopping sorcerer, or simply obliterates them at a sub-atomic level.

In the 18 stories that follow, half-orc bounty hunters merge with NAFTA regulations and aliens take much-needed coffee breaks. Do elves file TPS reports? Can a robot have a work-spouse? Add love, regret, friendship, the inevitable sternly worded HR email, and an arsenal of guns, death rays, explosives, necromancy, and...Santa Claus. Work gets weird when taking it offline requires structural sabotage and best practices include outsmarting The Devil.

Refreshments will be served with a side of eldritch chaos.

No experience unnecessary.

Proactive dynamic self-starters wanted.

©2021 Ani Fox Bochenkov (P)2021 David N. Wilson

Smart Layered Stories With a Earnest Real World Subtext

Marrying the silly and weird for a smart edgy social commentary. It's an anything goes rapid fire of varied far out science fiction, fantasy, horror, and other shades of fiction. Many of the stories are impregnated with modern social commentaries or with righteous elements of autobiography under the quantum oddities. It uses the short story format well with experimental strangeness and jarring commentaries that draw blood and fade back. I appreciated the textured layers of many tales; sometimes it would near break the 4th wall to scream it's modern day parallels. My favorite segment was 'It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder' which looks at competing cosmic entities in a context of 'the war on Christmas' and 'fake news.' I am a liberal and read the text as liberal leaning (it's author introduces himself as a gay neurodivergent jewish fellow) but sometimes the commentary felt too on the nose with modern day flashpoints (like the War on Christmas) and not as abstract or general or trusting of the reader to impose their own meaning. This isn't universally true and there are some more pulpy neutral tales like one with space leprechauns that smartly builds on at parallels with space travel and the lore. The narrator is spirited and reads with a rhythmed punchiness embellishing the humor, I might have preferred something a little less zany but I think the narrator fits the material well.

Breezed Through This Collection

4.5 out of 5 stars

I went into this one pretty blind knowing nothing about the author or the narrator. Though I know Crossroad Press pretty well as they publish some of my favorite authors like C.T. Phipps. So not completely blind.

I liked the idea of a book that talks about work, the intro of the “why write a book like this” really captures it: “The average person will spend 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime – unless it kills them first.” I wasn’t sure going into it how I was going to like the anthology since sometimes they jump around and cause me to get confused a bit, but I loved it. I love it when someone can write a concise and interesting short story and Fox was able to do that 18 different times. Sure, some of them were better than others but they were all really enjoyable. Each one had a different work-related story and each one really felt different and unique enough that it didn’t feel like I was continuing to read the same story over and over again. I couldn’t even tell that the same author wrote them in some cases.

I think Jobs Stranger Than Fiction was an excellent collection and definitely one that I’m glad I picked up. Fox was a stranger to me before this but I will definitely be on the lookout for more stories in the future. The same can be said for Ovard. I liked the narration a lot and I thought it was well performed and paced. Overall, a really darn enjoyable collection of stories that I breezed through and enjoyed quite a bit.