I don’t care to fly. It’s not that I’m terrified, it’s just that I like where I am. I didn’t seek out an anthology of stories to act as a checklist of all the things that could go wrong on an airplane that you never thought about, but here we have arrived and you are now free to move about the cabin.

This anthology was partially compiled by, and mainly introduced by, Stephen King, which is, of course, the primary selling point. The beauty is you get a new King story, some big names like Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Dan Simmons, and Joe Hill, and some authors/stories you may gave missed otherwise.
Although pitched as a horror anthology we see a pretty wide variety of stories from ghost stories (Cargo) to supernatural monsters (Zombies on a Plane) to monstrous people (Lucifer!). Non-horror stories that dwell on war time (War Birds, They Shall Not Grow Old), science-fiction (Air Raid) and even a murder mystery with an on-board detective (Murder in the Air).

You Are Released by Joe Hill is the stand out story in this collection, as far as I’m concerned. I would even go so far as to say it’s the best short story I’ve read in recent memory. It’s very current and real, and I was more than a little choked-up by the last page.
Other favorites were the King story; the Turbulence Expert, The Horror of the Heights by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Murder in the Air by Peter Tremayne. Some notable skips include The Fifth Category, Two Minutes Forty-Five Seconds(I haven’t found Dan Simmons’ short works as compelling as his longer ones), War Birds, and They Shall Not Grow Old.

One last note on the compilation; I found that the best stories were spread throughout the book, and reading it front-to-back, there were never days on end where I kept hitting clunkers. Bev Vincent and King did a really great job of putting an order to stories that transitioned between genres (or sub-genres) as well as classic versus modern. For the time being, I will continue to pick up any book with King’s name on the front, as long as the collections compiled, books that he blurbs, and books that he writes continue to be as consistently good as they have been.