The best of Clifford D. Simak Book

Madness from Mars - 2.5
Sunspot Purge - 4
The Sitters - 3.5
A Death In The House - 3.5
Final Gentleman - 4
Shotgun Cure - 3.5
Day of Truce - 2.5
Small Deer - 3
The Thing In The Stone - 4
The Autumn Land - 5

An odd and interesting little collection. Some bad stories with good endings, some good stories with bad endings and a few gems scattered about.

Simak seems to have a very quaint, poetic writing style that reminds me very much of Ray Bradbury - which is odd, because I find Bradbury frustrating and pretentious, mainly due to his writing style, whereas I have very much enjoyed the Simak I have so far read.

Time And Again and City are the only other works of his I have read so far, and both of these books begin with a man sitting in a rocking chair on his front porch. Many of the stories here also begin as such, and most are either set in Wisconsin or feature a character that hails from there. Many similar themes also run through his stories, such as a dissatisfaction with the way life is and the way it is going, which often requires the interjection of aliens - for better or for worse.
Simak also has a fondness for time travel, which is fine, because I've been a massive fan of time travel ever since I read H. G. Well's "The Time Machine".

Despite some of my ratings, I didn't think any of the stories to be particularly bad, just disappointing, or average. But even they had some redeeming qualities.
I enjoyed Sunspot Purge very much, simply because it had a noir-esque feel to it, it involved time travel but also involved other things happening in the background that later came to haunt both the protagonist and the reader.

I also enjoyed The Sitters and A Death In The House quite a lot, but I wasn't left particularly satisfied with the endings. There's also just something about friendly aliens that's just not that intriguing.

Final Gentleman was for the most part very good, and it brought to mind various elements of Dark City, The Matrix and Philip K. Dick's "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said".
Unfortunately, I wasn't too fond of the dramatic shift in tone that occurs towards the end of the story.

The Autumn Land was easily the best in the collection. I didn't even fully understand it, but I felt completely drawn in by the atmosphere painted by the author. A haunting story of a town in which time stands still, serving as an escape from a not too distant apocalypse.

All in all a worth while collection. I didn't feel like I wasted my time on any of the stories, though I do hope that they weren't the best of Simak as the title suggests, and that I can find some more gems in the future.