Disclaimer: I received an e-ARC from netgalley in exchange for a review.

I have never read something by this author before and so maybe I went into this expecting the wrong things? Either way I found myself disappointed throughout most of the collection. This is probably because this 212 pages collection features 38 seperate pieces, including stories/poems/little essays and the longest piece is around 40 pages, so you can imagine what that means for the remaining 37.
There were some short stories I liked such as the 3 Suicide Notes included, which were emotional and beautiful, full of pain and love and hate and both heartbreaking and interesting to read. The lenght also worked for them. I also enjoyed Schrodinger's Cat, a haunting short story about what to do if your cat ran away into a parallel universe and your girlfriend went after it to bring it back and explores the question of if you can be sure who returned. I also enjoyed Chasing Bill, where a sentient mannequin foils the terrorist plans of a med student. And lastly I enjoyed Help Us, a very short but interesting look into a world ravaged by a virus and two young lovers, who seem to be immune, it gets quite dark towards the end and I enjoyed that! This is one of the short stories that worked really well, despite being so short.
Unfortunately the number of stories I didn't really connect to (mostly due to lenght (or you know, the lack thereof)) is a lot higher than the number of stories I enjoyed. There's a story in there that just feels like a retelling of Cabinet Man by Lemon Demon. But set in a museum. There's many stories about abusive man, lost and hurt women, a variety of ghosts (also ghost pirates in space!) that should have made me feel more than they did, but just didn't work for me due to being so incredibly short that I just couldn't really feel anything for the characters. Often the ends were abrupt, the stories low on detail and very dialogue heavy and the characters thus often stereotypical or underdeveloped.
And then there where two stories I disliked, including "Stockholm Syndrome A Love Story" a trite beauty and the beast retelling where the beast turns out to be abusive afterwards as well. It doesn't add anything to the genre and was incredibly boring and predictable. I also disliked "Adam's Apple", where a virus is spread through contaminated toilet paper that turns humans uncaring and is currently causing the apocalypse through turning them into stereotypical stoners. This would be no problem, if it didn't also include the fatphobic stereotype of "humanity grows fat and lazy and that's why they go extinct".
All in all I do believe that some of these short stories could have done better if they had been extended and there are quite a few promising ideas in here, but I think that throwing all of them into one collection together did them a disservice. I really did love the idea of ghost pirates. In Space! But I didn't connect to the story a lot due to it being so short and low on detail. I do think that the writing and the plot ideas have a lot of potential though and if you are interested in flash fiction you might get more out of this collection than I did.

Trigger warnings for suicide, rape, domestic abuse, suicide, medical abuse, vomiting, fatphobia and ableism.