This review contains a vague spoiler! Please do not clarify further or put other spoilers in the comments.
Title: Urban Enemies
Author: Jim Butcher, Kevin Hearne, Kelley Armstrong, Seanan McGuire, Jonathan Maberry, and others (Edited by Joseph Nassise)
Stars: ★★★★
If you’re familiar with any of these authors, you’ll know their villains are, well, intense to put it mildly. Some have redeemable features – such as Marcone from Butcher’s Dresden Files, but they are all – as the title suggests – enemies. Villians with twisted moral codes, and some might just leave you sick to read the psychotic narration they’ve got going in their heads.
Murder, body modification without consent (like putting one person in another creature’s body), and more leave no doubt every single villain in this book has no problem getting their hands not just dirty but down-right rotten.
I found myself conflicted. I enjoyed Butcher’s short, and generally, the only others I enjoyed were authors I had previously read. Urban fantasy doesn’t feel like the right phrase for what some of these are, but fantasy – vague and broad – seems the best connector in general as the theme and intensity of the various villains doesn’t match well or smoothly transfer from one story to the next. If I were Nassise, I would have rethought the order – though putting Butcher first was a smart choice.
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Eli Celata 
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