At the Edges

There's plenty of variety in this story collection, one of the marks of a pro storyteller. From a time travel assassin to a robot boyfriend to the ghost of grandfather abducted by aliens, Asthana shows great range in here. There's a classic Western in “The Visitor” with its main character that invites all of our biases from the genre before it reveals the betrayal that always comes on the frontier. I was surprised at the humanism around every story. Monsters and Little Green Men kept me guessing about how each story would unfold. Asthana's got a three-novel series up here (Final Wars) on Amazon. This collection shows he's got a rich set of more stories left to tell.