The ten stories cover a range of themes and characters, though I found I had less empathy with some than others. Softly Spoke The Gabbleduck starts off as a simple enough trophy hunt that rapidly takes a couple of interesting twists, but I was left a little confused by the final one until reading some of the later stories. Putrefactors follows a bounty hunter on the trail of his lawbreaking quarry and left me with a suitably horrified shudder at its gruesome revelations. The macabre theme is taken a step further in Garp and Geronamid with the re-animation of the dead as the reified, and a play on the legend of the ghosts of murder victims who seek out their killer for revenge, with drug addiction and the horrific methods used to increase the drugs production likely to leave you squirming. My favourite quote comes from story four, the Sea of Death, as two characters discuss the find of millions of sarcophagi containing alien remains that, whilst not human, bear certain similarities:
The Gabble: And Other Stories Neal Asher
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