Spec Fic collections – Everything Is Better With Dragons

As I’m typing this (Tuesday 2nd September 2025) the Jury for the Best Collection Award for the 2025 British Fantasy Awards is deciding our winner. I can’t post these reviews until after the awards, so I’ve scheduled this post for Monday 3rd November 2025, after both the British Fantasy Awards and the World Fantasy Awards. I’m attending both this year, and you’ll probably find a list of winners popping up around the same time as this post.

The nominated books for the Best Collection Award this year were:

Elephants In Bloom, by Cecile Cristofari
Limelight and other stories, by Lynsey Croal
Preaching to the Perverted, by James Bennett
Dirt Upon My Skin, by Steve Toase
Mood Swings, by Dave Jeffery

They were all really good, but I found Limelight and Elephants in Bloom the most enjoyable. There’s something joyous about them as collections, the writing was good, and I enjoyed the variety of stories in each. I really couldn’t decide between them.

I get what Bennett was trying to do with Preaching to the Perverted, and individually the stories are impactful, but as a collection they’re really depressing. There’s not hope in them for a better future just present and past pain. It was a very challenging read, centring the experience of gay men, which is unusual in horror, or so I’m told (I don’t read much horror).

For Dirt Upon My Skin, the theme of archaeology appealed to me. It’s different and the way the author incorporates aspects of archaeological practice into each story in different ways was imaginative.

Mood Swings had some stories I liked but overall left little impression.

I already had a copy of Limelight (signed!) that I picked up at Fantasycon 2024, but I received a copy to read as part of the Jury. This means I have a pristine, unread (unsigned) copy of Limelight and other stories, by Lyndsey Croal to give away.