Heroes Wanted: A Fantasy Anthology is a collection of short stories by a group of fantasy authors on what it takes to be a hero from their perspective. Being that this was a completely free pickup on Amazon, I decided to give it a shot. Well, that plus the awesome cover art as well as seeing one of fantasy’s top author at the moment on the list of contributors and I was sold. I for one liked the theme chosen here. It’s simple yet it can mean a lot of different things to many different people depending on how you ask. As fantasy writers or pretty much any other authors for that matter, a hero or protagonist in their story tells a lot about the writer themselves.

Many of the short stories here were just moderately okay. There were only one or two where I wouldn’t have mind if it continued on to be a short standalone novel on its own. In many anthologies, there usually will be a couple of stories that will be hard to stomach. Luckily here, I’ve only discovered one such that I wasn’t able to finish and had to skip over. My suggestion when reading most anthologies is to take your time and not read all the stories in one go. Because the theme is the same for all, you can burn yourself out reading stories back to back and not get to enjoy them as much compared to spacing them out. For example, since the theme here revolves around what it takes to be a hero, you’re going to realize very soon that the protagonists in the stories will either somehow find a way to triumph evil in the end or counting on them to “do the right thing”. There’s usually not many surprises and so that’s why I tried to at least read one story in this anthology a week.

Nonetheless, it was great to see all of the authors in this book contribute something to the general public free of charge. Writing a story, no matter the length, takes time and thinking. I’d definitely recommend picking this up if just to simply fill up your collection to have something to read every now and then.