Stephen Cole once again takes the opening of the collection on himself, writing “Totem” under the name Tara Samms and as an opening it’s the bad edge of the double-edged sword.  It’s one of the Eighth Doctor stories for the anthology and is quite weak as an opener.  It’s only about eight pages long and Cole doesn’t actually do much with those eight pages, it wants to largely be a character piece musing on loss and grief, but Cole’s prose is rather simplistic making it come across as unemotional, and there isn’t nearly enough to make things work.  There’s the germ of an interesting idea here but it really needed to be in the hands of a different author to really work.  4/10.