Category: Book Reviews

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Book Review: Certain Dark Things by M.J. Pack

Certain Dark Things is a short story collection by M.J. Pack.

When doing a collection of short stories, it can be difficult to find balance. A lot of time the story placement seems almost random and the book will have no flow. Each story in Certain Dark Things seems as though it were meticulously picked out to appear in just the right order. None of the stories fall flat, it opens and ends on very strong notes.

The stories within cover hauntings, vampires (this story is excellent but I can’t say the title or it’ll give it away), the Apocalypse, love, loss and vengeful celebrities.

One of the hardest things to do in short fiction is crafting characters that people care about, M.J. Pack does a fabulous job of this in the small amount of time we get to experience her characters. Even her villains come off as sympathetic which is something I always like to see.

If you asked me to compare this book with other short story collections, I’d refuse. The material is fresh and original enough that it isn’t necessary.

I highly recommend picking up a copy of this book, you’ll most likely get through it in a single sitting but the stories are so good that you’ll be going through it multiple times. It’s absolutely worth adding to your collection.

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Book Review: Clockwork Universe by John W.Dennehy

I’ll start by saying that while this isn’t 100% horror, it has enough of the themes that I’ll count it. Being steampunk doesn’t hurt either. And now for the review

Clockwork Universe was a very fun read. It’s full of action and John’s writing style suits the genre very well.
The characters were well written and the dialogue was entertaining.

It follows Kevin Barnes, a modern man who plays in a punk band on the weekends. On one of his regular commutes, he finds himself in an unfamiliar Boston, one where steam is the primary source of energy. He soon meets up with some Big Game Hunters and the adventure begins.

I mentioned it briefly before, but the absolute strength of this novel is in the writing style of John W. Dennehy. His scene descriptions never go on longer than they should, which is something that a lot of steampunk suffers from and his prose isn’t overly flowery. He does a terrific job of vividly painting the world and the characters and it’s an absolute blast to experience.

If you enjoy steampunk but find that it’s all starting to blend together then I definitely recommend picking up a copy of this book. It’s a breath of fresh air in a genre that is currently stagnating and waiting for fresh ideas.

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Book Review: My Soul To Keep by Jackie Sonnenberg

This book is part of a series where Jackie takes old nursery rhymes and writes horror stories based off of them. If the rest of the stories are even half as good as this one, we’re all in for some good reading.

My Soul To Keep follows the story of Sky, who starts at a brand new boarding school after the death of her father. She joins the group Guardians of Light and soon gets wrapped up in their secrets.

When I’m reading a book, there’s only two things I really care about: The characters and the world building. I can forgive some weaker dialogue (not present here) and some tired old clichés (also not present here) as long as the characters are intriguing and the world that the author created is worth visiting. I was very happy with both of those in My Soul To Keep.

Even though it’s horror, there’s a sense of wonder and magic to the world that Jackie has created. The characters are fully fleshed out and while you’ll sometimes want to throw the book (or e-reader if you read it digitally like I did) in frustration, you’re doing it because you care about them so you’ll let a lot of their actions slide

Final thoughts:

I will read more works from Jackie and I’m very hyped to continue this series. I recommend this book to anybody who loves the paranormal.

 

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Book Review: At The Cemetery Gates

At the Cemetery Gates: Year One, by John Brhel and Joseph Sullivan

I remember going to sleepovers as a kid, and staying up into the wee hours of the morning trading scary stories and urban legends in hushed tones with my friends. We’d swear up and down that we knew someone who knew someone who knew the girl whose boyfriend was murdered by the hook hand killer. We’d retell local legends, and stories we’d read in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.The tales were short and sweet, getting to the good stuff quickly and allowing for the storyteller to embellish for maximum effect. It spawned an entire generation of horror fans, including authors John Brhel and Joseph Sullivan, who paid homage to the Scary Stories collections with their newest book, At the Cemetery Gates: Year One.

The following aren’t short stories so much as they are digestible suburban fables.

Cemetery Gates Media presents a collection of fourteen twisted tales clocking in at 168 pages of consumable bites of horror and dark fiction, written in the very style that made Alvin Schwarz’s tales so popular two decades ago. Rather than setting everything up neatly like a regular short story, Brhel and Sullivan condense their stories into compact vignettes that are ready for retelling around a campfire, or in a bedroom late at night.

Favorites include:

Passion’s Paroxysm, a quick glimpse into a day in the life of a mistreated husband. The surprise ending make this tale destined to be an urban legend

The Girl With The Crooked Tooth, a thoroughly eerie homage to Edgar Allen Poe, complete with a creepy dude with an odd obsession with a woman. I don’t like dental stuff, so this one really got under my skin. The beautiful prose and unsettling imagery stuck with me.

New Year’s Eve, What A Gas!, about a simple mistake leading to catastrophic consequences. If you like the stories that play on fears of being killed at random, for no good reason, this is sure to titillate.

Considering that I couldn’t find a bad thing to say about this collection and found it to be even more enjoyable than their last anthology, I give this book the full 5 stars. Many of these stories are trope-heavy, but that’s how good lore works. It follows a basic template, and works as a means of expressing universal fears in American society. Anonymous murderers, poison in our food, and systematic conspiracies that affect the marginalized are all things that many of us worry about.  Urban legends synthesize those apprehensions into morsels of dread that serve to remind us that death awaits us everywhere, at all times. I’d heartily recommend At The Cemetery Gates to readers who want a little something to nibble on before bed each night, and to young horror fans who want something juicy to regale to their friends between classes. Find it on Amazon.

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Nightmares: Book Review

nightmares-cover

Ellen Datlow is a master curator of fiction, and though she calls herself a “horror enthusiast,” I don’t think it’s a stretch to say she is also one of the guiding hands of the genre. Her Best Horror of the Year anthologies are a snapshot of current trends in horror, offering readers a sampling of new and established authors in one volume. Nightmares expands on those best-of collections and represents Datlow’s favorite short fiction from the years spanning 2005 to 2015.

Every story in the collection is exceptional. This surprised me. Usually, anthologies contain a tale or two that made me wonder how it made the cut, but not this one. There were a few stories that I’d read before and was delighted to read again. Sometimes, a story brought up personal terrors and was hard to read, but isn’t that what horror is supposed to do?

It took me several weeks to read all 24 stories because I had to think about what I’d just read. I spent a few nights staring at the ceiling trying to chase the afterimages out of my brain so I could sleep.

Here are the stories that kept me awake:

“Closet Dreams” by Lisa Tuttle left me with fear scrabbling at the inside of my ribcage. A survivor of an ordeal at the hands of a depraved child molester can’t let go of the past. Her abductor had forced her into a closet during the day so no one would hear her if she screamed for help. After her escape, and years of therapy, the dreams of the closet still haunt her. She tries to glean clues from her dreams – something that can give the police a means to find her captor – but all she can see is the dark, and the room beyond the crack under the door.

“Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8)” by Caitlín R. Kiernan made me read it twice. Twin sisters cruise across a landscape of blood, depravity and blind, obsessive love. They mark their map and memories by the bodies in their wake. To me, they may be escaping hell or hurtling toward it, or perhaps they’re already there.

The story that challenged me the most was “Omphalos” by Livia Llewellyn. It’s transgressive and brutal, pushing the boundaries of parental cruelty into a nightmare of a vacation. Their love is abusive and drives their daughter June into territory that only she can see on the map. Her father wants her to take him with her, but she alone knows the way to the center where chaos and darkness lies.

There are so many more. This is the best anthology I’ve read all year and a must-have for any horror fan’s bookshelf.