Cruel miracles

Cruel Miracles is a collection of science fiction short stories that explore religious themes as well as disgust. The cover seemed quite misleading, but sci-fi books are notorious for bad covers. In addition to the stories, the book contains a forward describing the themes as well as an afterward giving some background for each of the stories.

• Mortal Gods -
  Aliens that admire humans because they have the ability to die.
  This quickly got to its point.
  
• Kingsmeat - A "shepherd" that helps to "save" a planet from a human-eating king by cutting off body parts to be served up to the king. The people return the favor by preserving his life - without any "unneeded" body parts.
  This was disgusting. It does show the desire of people to seek "revenge" for "wrongdoings", even if it made them better off. In a "trial", the people all saw that the shepherd and bravely helped to defend their lives. However, they also knew that he was the one that would come and whack off their body parts. They were not able to let go of the bad feelings, leaving the Shepherd in a most debilitated state. The Shepherd, meanwhile, comes across as noble, willingly putting up with the "suffering" the people have given him.
  
• Eye for Eye - A cult of inbreds that can kill other people with cancer and one boy that was so powerful, they had him raised by an orphanage. This was long and well written, however, it seemed to end prematurely. It could be great fodder for a novel.
  
• Saving Grace -
  A boy that admires "healers" to the extent that he paralyzes himself so that he can be healed. Unfortunately, the healer is a fraud. However, the boy ends up being a healer himself, able to heal others (but not himself.) In the end, the first person he healed comes to his home, declares her life has been miserable since being healed, and asks to help out at the boy's house.
  
• St. Amy's Tale - A group of people that remove every last trace of "civilization" before going to live in a "primitive" society. The husband of the crew leader, however, had hid some documents of the civilization and attempted to have them preserved. The leader destroys these remnants, but the husband chooses to be destroyed with them, rather then be saved. The wife is later executed for attempted to provide food to neighboring groups. Would a society try to totally annihilate its culture? Could they really do it? And on a smaller scale, when a loved-one does not do the "right thing" you expect them to do, and is thus hurt by your reactions, how do you atone for it?
  I liked the style this story used, providing parallel tracks of the actual "past" and remembrances of the past.
  
• Holy - A man's quest to fulfill a quest to deposit a dead man's excrement at the top of a mountain while dodging bullets of a tribal war. I lost interest in this one.
  

The forward and afterword were every bit as good as the stories - maybe even better. The stories themselves were not that bad, though there were bits of violence and vulgarity that were off-putting. Eye for Eye and St. Amy's Tale both have a lot of open ends that could set them up well for longer treatments - though they would require some additional work.