The Blue Moon Café: Where Shifters Meet to Drink by Ioana Visan is a collection of seven short paranormal stories. The short story is not an easy genre to market, especially given the proliferation of novellas these days. However, this collection works almost as a short novel, given the unifying underlying theme of shifters, and the characters who are common throughout, although the disparity in the stories’ lengths mean they don’t really equate to chapters. Werewolves – mutts – and the less common were-eagles who double up as crows are the main characters we meet, but there are humans and “smoking hot vampires” too. The Mayor is trying to keep things calm in his town with a rather volatile mix of different shifter species and has various levels of success.
There are plenty of humourous touches and lots of imagination in evidence in these quirky, tightly plotted stories. There’s romance, tension, craziness, suspense, threat. Each story in the collection has a slightly different tone, from comedy in Once in a Blue Moon, with the added moral of ‘be careful what you buy off someone in a bar’, to tension and conflict in A Mutt Problem, to definite foreboding yet optimism in The Day We Shot the Moon out of the Sky. The various characters are sparsely yet adequately portrayed. This author concentrates her writing energy where it matters most – in creating atmosphere and entertainment. The book would benefit hugely from a more original title. There is a sea of books with Blue Moon Café in the title, many of them collections of short stories, and I worry that this book could drown in them. It deserves to stand out from the crowd. Sadly, the cover doesn’t do the book full justice either and doesn’t reflect the class and quality of Ioana Visan’s writing. But this is definitely a book worth reading.