Heart of the Scrapdog – Short Story Collection by Isaac Nasri

Heart of the Scrapdog – Short Story Collection by Isaac Nasri
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Romance, Action/Adventure
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

After a perfidious operation that almost costed him his life, Troy Levi, an sagacious agent for the FBI, is granted a second chance, albeit a cyborg for the agency’s Virtual Division. However, this action does not come, without a price. He strives relentlessly to find grounding in a contemporary society that judges him and many others of his kind for who they are. A short story collection that will leave many readers fluctuating from hope to trepidation.

Getting new cyborg body parts won’t fix all of your problems, but they can be a good start.

All five of these stories were about the same main character and many of the same secondary characters as well. It was fascinating to get to know different facets of their personalities over time, especially as new people were introduced and Troy spent more time talking about how he felt about becoming a cyborg. There was a lot of ground to cover here, but the characters had plenty of opportunities to get to know each other and share themselves with the audience.

This collection would have benefitted from another round or two of editing. I discovered numerous examples of missing words, punctuation errors, and run-on sentences among other issues. As interested as I was in the storyline itself, all of the mistakes were so distracting and confusing that I couldn’t justify giving this book a higher rating.

I enjoyed reading the descriptions of the characters and setting. Mr. Nasri clearly put a lot of effort into who his characters were as individuals, what they looked like, and what the various places he visited would be like to experience in person. It was easy for me to visualize all of these things which made me want to keep reading and find out what would happen next. The author struck a nice balance between describing things to his audience in detail while also keeping the plot moving forward. That’s not always easy to do in such a short medium.

Heart of the Scrapdog was a fast-paced collection that I’d recommend to anyone who enjoys cyberpunk tales.