"We wrote about summertime and that incredible feeling when the last bell rings [to end a school year]," writes Amy Sterling Casil in her introduction to what she calls the "first written-for-Fictionwise" original-fiction anthology. Being a rarer animal now than in years past, speculative-fiction anthologies of any kind deserve at least a look, and electronic anthologies often hide gems of stories not found in print versions. The text was easy to read on my desktop computer screen and the overall design's simplicity was a big plus; fussy design formats in e-books detract from the stories therein. But there were problems on the technical side of this particular house. Let's deal with the fiction first, then I'll discuss the technical snafus.

In general, I found Casil's story selection consistent in terms of the anthology's theme. The overall quality of the stories was uneven, but that's true of most anthologies -- no editor ever gets all the best stories. But that "incredible feeling" was present in several of the stories, and adult readers will likely find scenes from their own educational pasts in at least one of the tales collected here.

The volume opens strongly with two stories that treat the teenage years quite seriously. In "Connections" by Matt Horgan, junior-high student Sara and her friends worry about the same things all teens worry about -- clothes, friends, popularity -- and electronic implants. Instead of pagers, Sara and her friends have ear buds, audio-only electronic organizers. The "pops" (popular clique members) have implants, an upgrade from buds. In Sara's world, musical artists are pigeonholed into awards-show categories with no room to move, and the shows are virtual to boot -- as are a lot of other events and activities teens would, in our world, actually participate in physically. Horgan's method of dropping in these details of life gone generic produce an eerie anxiety, a feeling that a cage is being built around Sara -- around the reader -- one bar at a time. But Sara has an adventurous spirit, and as she explores the real-world places she's never seen -- a grocery store, a library with actual books -- she discovers virtual reality isn't as essential to her happiness as she was led to believe.

Though well-written, "Connections" is softly delivered, sapping the strength from its apparent point of the dangers in relying too heavily on material things for emotional validation. A more emphatic method of bringing that point home would have given this story more power.

The Bradburyesque fantasy "Penny Lombard and the Heart Ken Found" by Stoker Award winner Alan Rodgers definitely has power. A comics-infatuated 12-year-old boy discovers two things that mystify him -- a girl who likes him, and a beating human heart with no body anywhere in sight. It's a fascinating tale about childhood's end and that loss of the sense of wonder which adulthood often brings.

The middle stories of the collection are mostly on the lighter side, ranging from comic SF to mild horror, but the quality of their writing and editing is much more uneven. The strongest of this group is "Hell Week at Grant-Williams High," Vera Nazarian's version of finals week in a school where the teachers really live up to their reputations as monsters. Senior Emily gives frosh brother Jimmy a shakedown tour of Hell Week at their high school -- a week where all the school's employees actually turn into monsters. This story feels like it was aimed more at a YA reading audience than an adult one, despite some of the vocabulary used, and adult readers may find this irritating. But give it a chance, it grows on you.

Nazarian pays homage in dialogue, plot twists, and characterization to Joss Whedon's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" TV series. There are funny moments here that may spark school memories in readers regardless of their age. The story's also sprinkled with other pop-culture icon references ("Angel," "Aliens"). Hindu religious beliefs play a pivotal role in the ending, where blood once again proves to be thicker than water -- or Hell Week. Nazarian pays attention to details and it pays off in dialogue that fairly breathes current phrasing and slang. Readers put off by pop-culture references would do well to remember that media and culture feed each other, and snobbery is just so not cool.

James Van Pelt's "High Stakes Test" involves a teacher whose principal is more concerned with test scores than education. The teacher would prefer the opposite. When the principal decides to try raising the school's overall scores by "importing" what he thinks will be hard-working, intelligent students, he's surprised to discover they're not quite human, not quite . . . alive. This is, very unfortunately, the weakest story and seriously marred by a host of editorial errors, ones that should have been caught and fixed by the copy editor -- the evidence is there in the text. My previous experiences in reading Van Pelt's work have been very positive, and I was mystified as to why this story had so many warts. It was enough to make a copy editor gnash teeth.

The remaining stories in the middle section are all fairly light and entertaining, though copy-editing failures grate on the nerves in numerous places. "Flunking the Assassin" by Michael A. Arnzen is a delightfully icky little tale about an assassins' school student who flunks out -- and stays alive completely by mistake. George Pickett is a disaster as an assassin, and is illiterate to boot -- something the school principal just can't condone. The characters are well-drawn, and I didn't see the ending coming, so kudos to Arnzen for doing a good job distracting at least one reader.

A more predictable plot mars Tobias S. Buckell's otherwise-enjoyable "Nord's Gambit," which explores the amazing feats of a certain school's staff -- cafeteria cooks who make school food completely tasteless, teachers who can grade more than a hundred science papers in one night and actually get some sleep as well, and other wonders.

The one story of the collection that skips the "school's out" theme is "Oh-oh" by John C. Bodin and Ron Collins. An alien undercover agent is assigned to investigate the string of losses that Mario Andretti has endured in the Indy 500. His employers, the D'Garzi Gambling Commission, suspect another alien species is fiddling with the race somehow. Oh, yeah, aliens bet on Earth sporting events all the time, and Indy's the top draw. Some readers might dismiss this as a gimmick story, but it's better than that.

Casil's contribution, "The Universe in the Bottom of A Cereal Box," is a zesty space opera romp featuring a young woman (still in high school) who's snatched away from her breakfast to battle alien hunters, all without her permission. This was a good story, with great characterization and fine details -- and nary a copy-editing error. One has to wonder, then, whether the other stories in this anthology ever got the same level of care as this story so obviously did.

And there were a lot of copy-editing errors. The first hint of trouble came when I couldn't find a credit line for Casil as the anthology's editor. Knowing who edits an anthology that I like allows me to keep the name in mind for future anthology-hunting. If I were the editor, I'd want to be sure potential readers knew it by being specific about it.

The next hint arrived when I began reading the first story and noticed minor errors that a competent copy editor should have caught and corrected (misspellings, missing words, misused words). Upon later pondering, I wondered whether I'd been sent an Advanced Readers Copy (ARC), but there was nothing accompanying the file to indicate this when I received it. ARCs often contain such minor errors, and as long as a reviewer knows ahead of time that the item is an ARC, minor errors are generally not mentioned. But as I continued reading, more and more errors cropped up, distracting my attention from the fiction.

Someone didn't do their job properly, I think, and I'm not pointing a finger at Casil when I say this. I don't know whose job it was to copy edit the stories here, so I can't very well point a finger at any specific person, just the specific job. Any story suffers from poor or no copy editing. Good copy editors don't change the meaning of the story: they make it look better by getting rid of the stumbling blocks.

This is even more important for electronic publishers, because they have to be better than the dead-tree publishers in all ways to consistently draw readers to their products. Otherwise, they look like a toaster manufacturer who forgets to attach an electrical cord to the toaster. At the end of it all, books, regardless of format, are products. If a company wants consumers to buy its product instead of another one, that company had better make sure it outshines all the competition.

Ultimately, what kept me from popping the disk out of my computer and throwing it at the wall in frustration were the last two stories in this collection, a very strong finishing pair.

The ghosts of Columbine are exhumed in Lisa Silverthorne's "Safe As the Dark," but not the ghosts of the victims. Coby Barnes followed his friend Turner's lead in planning and carrying out a shooting spree with their friend Rick at McKinley High, modeled after Target Assault, their favorite videogame. None of them expected to live through their "live" version of the game. But in Silverthorne's creation, the three young killers are revived and sent to The Block, where the grisly fun of picking off whatever moves can be continued. Rick doesn't make it past the first five-hour blackout, during which medical assistance and food are doled out to the survivors. Coby blindly follows Turner to one raid after another against rival Block gangs, until he sees something beyond a slowly turning fan that causes him to think instead of shoot. It's a story of revenge, of hopelessness, of ignorance and reckless disregard for human life -- and there is no happy ending. Despite the lack of depth in Turner's character and the fact that this killer bases his actions on a videogame, there really are people like him in the world who really do such things, and Silverthorne forces the reader to acknowledge it. This is among the best stories in this anthology.

The mystery of school lunch content is finally explained, in humorous fashion, in "Why I Bring A Bag Lunch Now" by Tom Gerencer. Two middle-school boys trying to avoid eating their despicable viands are informed by a POW disguised as a pepper (yes, you read that right) that some of the school staff are aliens, the school building is a spaceship, and they'll be in fifth grade for 10,000 years if they don't save themselves right this minute. What a set-up! It's a rollicking ride of a story. Gerencer delivers the best comeback line about starving children in foreign countries that I've ever encountered, and makes me wish I'd though of it when I was 12 years old and stuck at the dining table with a plate of liver and onions (shudder). Minor story elements (like kids being able to fiddle with official documents, despite the fact that there are school administrators who harp about student honesty and document security while everything that's supposedly secure is wide open for pilfering and alteration) felt too convenient, but the story was written well enough that I could let them slide in order to enjoy the tale.

Switch.blade: School's Out felt as though it was produced in a rush, and that's a shame, because any story deserves better than that. I have to wonder whether the anthology's editor was able to read every story in final form before publication. If the editor was not able to do so, I have to wonder further what went wrong, because the writers deserved better.

I liked Casil's introduction and her story, and I've heard good things about Fictionwise overall, so I won't be slapping a run-away-fast sticker on this review. The mix of serious and humorous tales reflects the emotional experiences many readers probably had (or have) while attending institutions of learning -- funny, scary, sad, and happy. The technical production quality was certainly lacking, but overall, the stories' quality was high enough to give this a "good read" rating.

J.G. Stinson is a freelance editor and writer who also knits, crochets, and strings shiny beads together -- sometimes in the wrong order.