C is for Chimera by Rhonda Parrish, editor

April 15, 2016 By Leave a Comment

CHIMERA
C is for Chimera by Rhonda Parrish, editor
Publisher: Poise and Pen Publishing
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Paranormal, Horror, Historical, Contemporary
Length: Full Length (259 pages)
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

This installment of Rhonda Parrish’s alphabet anthology series asks skilled storytellers to write around the theme of chimera. The resulting tales are part fable, part poem, part dream. But like any chimera, the parts make up a greater whole.

Blend reality with fantasy. Mesh science fiction with mystery. Mix history with what should have been. They are all chimera.

A shadow tells a tale of schoolyard bullies. A long-vanished monster returns from the cold dark. Make-up makes up a life. Alchemy, Atlantis, and apocalypse. These 26 tales bring both chaos and closure to dark and elusively fantastic geographies.
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Contributing authors include:

~ Alexandra Seidel ~ KV Taylor ~ Marge Simon ~ Pete Aldin ~ Michael M. Jones ~ Simon Kewin ~ BD Wilson ~ Gabrielle Harbowy ~ Sara Cleto ~ Megan Engelhardt ~ Michael Fosburg ~ Megan Arkenberg ~ Lilah Wild ~ Laura VanArendonk Baugh ~ Milo James Fowler ~ Brittany Warman ~ Michael B. Tager ~ L.S. Johnson ~ Beth Cato ~ C.S. MacCath ~ Sammantha Kymmell-Harvey ~ Steve Bornstein ~ Suzanne van Rooyen ~ Michael Kellar ~ Jonathan C. Parrish ~ Amanda C. Davis ~

These chimeras came in every shape and size I could imagine and even a few I never would have dreamed of.

The main character in Michael M. Jones’ “E” was a spirit who was trapped in a high school after losing her own body. At first she spent her time shadowing the students there, but she soon found herself drawn to a lonely girl named Madeline. There weren’t many clues about what was going on, but the ones that were provided were irresistibly fascinating. I also loved how clearly the spirit’s personality was described. Even though I had no idea what she looked like, I could still picture her in my mind because of how much I knew about her habits, interests, and flaws. While I would have loved to know what happened after the final scene, this did work really well as a short story.

What originally attracted me to this collection was the thought of reading so many tales about chimeras. I was curious to see how twenty-six different writers would approach the same idea, and in many cases their twists on the topic were incredibly creative and memorable. With that being said, this anthology was uneven in places. Milo James Fowler’s “O” was one of the stories that could have used more polishing. The plot showed what happened when the surrounding community discovered what Dr. Horstmann had been experimenting with in his spare time. While I was intrigued by the premise, everything happened so quickly that I had trouble figuring out what it was the doctor had been doing or why the people who lived nearby were so alarmed by his work. There simply wasn’t enough time to explore the storyline the way it needed to be explored.

Megan Arkenberg’s “L” grabbed my attention when the narrator confessed to murder before the end of the first sentence. Immediately I wanted to know more about who the main character was and why she’d killed someone. It was the last thing I would have expected to encounter in a quiet, rural, nineteenth-century setting. Figuring out what was happening only made me curious to learn more, although I can’t say anything else about the plot without giving away spoilers. Like “E,” this could have easily been expanded into something full length. The fact that I’m so eager to know what happened next for both of them is a sign of how well written they were.

I’d recommend C is for Chimera to anyone who enjoys smart science fiction anthologies.

Filed Under: Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction/Fantasy Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Wind Chill by Patrick Rutigliano

April 12, 2016 By Leave a Comment

CHILL
Wind Chill by Patrick Rutigliano
Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Horror, Paranormal, Holiday, Contemporary
Length: Short Story (100 pages)
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

What if you were held captive by your own family?

Emma Rawlins has spent the last year a prisoner. The months following her mother’s death dragged her father into a paranoid spiral of conspiracy theories and doomsday premonitions. Obsessing him, controlling him, they now whisper the end days are finally at hand.

And he doesn’t intend to face them alone.

Emma finds herself drugged and dragged to a secluded cabin, the last refuge from a society supposedly due to collapse. Their cabin a snowbound fortress, her every move controlled, but even that isn’t enough to weather the end of the world.
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Everything she knows is out of reach, lost beyond a haze of white. There is no choice but to play her father’s game while she plans her escape.

But there is a force far colder than the freezing drifts. Ancient, ravenous, it knows no mercy. And it’s already had a taste…

It’s hard to reason with a kidnapper.

This was one of the most intense things I’ve read in a long time. I actually ended up devouring the whole thing in less than two days because of how eager I was to see what would happen next. The only thing scarier to me than being abducted would be if my abductor was someone I loved and trusted. Emma’s reaction to her new prison kept me perched on the edge of my seat from the first scene to the last one.

I would have liked to see more time spent developing the ending. The pacing in the beginning and the middle was excellent, but it suddenly sped up in the last few scenes. I went from breathlessly wondering what would happen next to feeling shocked that it was suddenly finished because of how quickly everything was paced. It would have been interesting to see how those scenes worked in a longer novella. There seemed to be enough material in the plot to warrant a longer storyline, and having that extra time would have made the end feel less abrupt to me.

Emma was so brave. I liked seeing how she reacted to her impossible circumstances, especially once she started to put the pieces together and figure out what was happening in her life. She was also such an easy main character to relate to because of how freely she shared her ideas with the audience.

Several other horror stories were included after Wind Chill ended. They surprised me because I didn’t realize this was an anthology when I originally requested it. It’s hard to say much else about this bonus content without giving away major spoilers due to how short each tale was. I definitely do suggest checking them out, though, as they were all well written and pretty scary.

Wind Chill made me shudder at the thought of being alone in a cabin in the woods in the middle of winter. I’d recommend it to anyone who has ever listened to the wind beat against their windows and shivered at the idea that there might be something other than a storm raging outside.

Filed Under: Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction/Fantasy Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Eidolon Avenue: The First Feast by Jonathan Winn

March 29, 2016 By Leave a Comment

AVENUE
Eidolon Avenue: The First Feast by Jonathan Winn
Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Paranormal, Horror, Contemporary
Length: Short Story (148 pages)
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

Eidolon Avenue: where the secretly guilty go to die.

One building. Five floors. Five doors per floor. Twenty-five nightmares feeding the hunger lurking between the bricks and waiting beneath the boards.

The First Feast. A retired Chinese assassin in apartment 1A fleeing from a lifetime of bloodshed. A tattooed man in 1B haunted by his most dangerous regret. A frat boy serial killer in 1C facing his past and an elderly married couple stumbling and wounded from fifty years of failed murder/suicide pacts in 1D. And, finally, a young girl in 1E whose quiet thoughts unleash unspeakable horror.

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You never really know what your neighbors might do when no one else is around.

The main character in “Apartment 1A – Lucky” was an old woman nicknamed Lucky who has carried a terrible secret for decades. It took me a while to get into this story because of how often the narrator jumped from her dark memories of the past to the quiet life she was leading in the present. These time periods were often so jumbled up in her mind that I wasn’t sure what was going on or how I should interpret certain scenes. I wanted to understand them much better than I did, but they were often so blended together that I couldn’t tell where the past ended and the present began. With that being said, her eerily calm descriptions of the things she’d seen and done made me shudder. They were a chilling introduction to the horrors hidden inside all of these apartments.

“Apt. 1B – Bullet” was about a drug addict who kept discovering strange things happening to his skin. Sometimes he’d find a brand new tattoo when his drugs wore off and he woke up. At other times one of his existing tattoos would grow larger or develop details that it had never had before. The fast pace worked well with the subject matter of this plot, especially during the last few scenes when there was a lot of information to take in. I also liked how much attention the author paid to small details as he described what the main character was experiencing.

What scared me the most about “Apt. 1C – Click” was how coldly Colton described the women he had picked up. It was like he was talking about buying a new lamp instead of getting to know a fellow human being. Sometimes the most frightening thing of all is someone who is this detached from life. I was fascinated by how vividly this part of his personality was shared with the audience. It was exactly what the storyline needed in order to be as creepy as possible.

Is there such a thing as loving someone too much? In “Apt. 1D – Anniversary,” Marta and Benji have been happily married for many years and never want to be separated. Their response to the possibility of one of them dying and leaving the other one behind was as disturbing as it was fascinating. There were a few problems with the logic of it all that I would have liked to see more attention paid to, but it was still intriguing to see how Benji and Marta planned to solved this problem.

There were parts of Umbra’s relationship with her grandmother in “Apt. 1E – Umbra” that never made sense to me. As a child Umbra was sent to live with her grandmother after a tragedy. Based on certain things the grandmother eventually mentioned, though, it seemed odd that the grandmother would have ever agreed to take the girl in. While I was definitely spooked by the main plot, I spent much more time questioning this part of the tale than I would have liked to. It would have been helpful to have a longer explanation of why the main character ended up living with her grandmother as that decision was so important to all of the scenes that came after it.

I’d recommend Eidolon Avenue: The First Feast to anyone who likes their horror gory and visceral.

Filed Under: Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction/Fantasy Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Baba Fête by T.C. Tereschak

March 22, 2016 By Leave a Comment

BAB
Baba Fête by T.C. Tereschak
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Paranormal, Horror, Contemporary
Length: Short Story (72 pages)
Rating: 4.5 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

Ben Freitag is frazzled; he’s barely slept in weeks. After delivering beautiful, healthy twin boys, his wife, Chloe returned home diagnosed with a severe case of postpartum depression. Listless and lethargic, she seems to want nothing to do with them or Ben, who is running low on everything: love, energy, patience and time off from work. So when Chloe’s estranged great-grandmother, the almost mythical, Baba Fête, offers her assistance Ben welcomes her.

The seemingly ageless and vivacious Baba whooshes in, effortlessly managing the household and convinces Ben to go back to work; she will take care of the house and his family. Now Ben can get some sleep and return to some sense of normality.
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Overwhelmed by Baba and lured back into the warm rhythm of work, Ben doesn’t notice what’s happening; something had invaded Ben’s home and is eating his family away—literally.

Every family has its share of quirky relatives and old rivalries. What the Freitag’s are dealing with, though, goes far beyond anything you could possibly imagine.

The character building in this tale was excellent. I got to know Ben’s personality so quickly and thoroughly that it only took me a few scenes to notice when he suddenly wasn’t acting like himself. This is a difficult thing to pull off in a short story. The fact that the author was able to do it so early on in the plot makes me eager to check out everything else they’ve written. I was really impressed, and I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

This is an extremely minor criticism, but I would have liked to see the narrator spend a little more time explaining what Ben and his family knew about Baba Fête before she arrived at their home. There were a few things about her relationship with them that I found slightly odd because of how quickly Ben glossed over what should have been early warning signs that something was wrong. This could have easily been explained with a little more attention paid to her origins and what she was capable of doing. Had it been explained fully, I would have given this book a perfect rating as I loved everything else about it!

Anticipating what scary things could happen next is a big part of why I like the horror genre so much. The pacing in this book gave me plenty of opportunities to wonder what Baba Fête was up to and why so many of the people around her were suddenly getting sick. I couldn’t wait to find out what was happening, but I was also glad that the author revealed it all so leisurely. That pacing style worked perfectly for the plot and the characters.

Baba Fête is a must read for anyone who enjoys being frightened as much as I do.

Filed Under: Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction/Fantasy Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Black Creek by Gregory Lamberson

February 25, 2016 By Leave a Comment

CREEK
Black Creek by Gregory Lamberson
Publisher: Medallion Press
Genre: Contemporary, Suspense/Mystery, Horror
Length: Full Length (432 pgs)
Rating: 5 stars
Reviewed by Ginger

In 1979, the US government relocated more than eight hundred families from Love Canal, New York, after decades of toxic contamination. Not all of the residents left: some remained in their homes on the outskirts of the disaster area. Others went underground. Hiding. Changing. Breeding.

Almost four decades later, Love Canal has been renamed Black Creek Village and restored for inhabitation. The residents there and on neighboring Cayuga Island remember the tragedy of Love Canal but have no knowledge of the monsters living below the surface. When the worst snowstorm in forty years isolates all of western New York, the forgotten inhabitants of Love Canal emerge from hiding to reclaim what once belonged to them.

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This is a book that I thoroughly enjoyed. The description of the neighborhood and characters were so real it is easy to picture the scenes as they are playing out. The plot is one that could be related to true life events. This is an extremely well-written novel which will tug at the conscience of readers as it takes a hard look at the environmental damage of poorly dispose chemical waste. While reading I couldn’t help but think of the water problems that are affecting Flint, Michigan now.

I like how the author set up the plot that parallels to a normal day’s setting; the characters going about their daily routine set the events in motion and helped the events play out as a movie script. The fear of bad weather and how the news casters were broadcasting the threat of bad weather was played out with details that made the threat seem real. The suspense and circumstances of the storm was enjoyable and had me on the edge of my seat and not wanting to put the book down. I like the quick scene changes because it made the book move even faster and I didn’t have to wait long to catch the events for the characters next few moments.

The author’s grim and brooding novel explores the lives of the people of Niagara Falls during a storm as creatures use this time to hunt prey. The characters were true to life. They were funny and the setting for them is real. Poor Paul Goodman, he was the father of the neighborhood being set out to help and look out for all in the neighborhood. A few times I felt sorry for him and if something did happen to him how would his wife feel? They were a close and caring neighborhood that looked out for each other.

Though I enjoyed the story I was left with a question of why the monster kept some humans alive and why others were killed quickly. Their animalistic instincts and traits were those of hunters. I also wondered why at this particular time during the snow storm did they choose to come out and hunt. Either way, the monster were scary to me with their human like characteristics and features and how they moved about the city.

I enjoyed the author’s writing style so much that I will look to see what other books he has published. The writing was clear, descriptive and easy to picture the characters and the scenes. The strong characters made the storyline that much more interesting and there is always something different happening that had me at the edge of my seat.

This is a highly recommended read for those that enjoy a well written suspense that has lively characters, and a great plot.

Filed Under: Horror, Mystery/Suspense, Reviews Tagged With: , , , , , ,

You Have Been Murdered and Other Stories by Andrew Kozma

February 24, 2016 By Leave a Comment

YOU
You Have Been Murdered and Other Stories by Andrew Kozma
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Paranormal, Horror, Contemporary, Historical
Length: Short Story (26 pages)
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

You Have Been Murdered and Other Stories is a collection of weird, speculative fiction containing four stories dealing with the end of the world, both in terms of the death of the individual soul and the running down of the universe as a whole.

The title story presents a woman who’s been murdered and still has a dinner party to prepare for. In “Teller of Tales,” a young girl must take on the responsibility of being the necessary conscience of her city. “Breach of Contract” describes the plight of an oil man who just wants to insure production quotas, but is roped into saving the world. Lastly, “The Trouble-Men” details what happens when a man trying to survive the end of the world meets up with those who are ending it.

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Life as you know it can change in an instant. Are you ready?

The title of “You Have Been Murdered” gave away its premise: you are the main character, and you’ve just been murdered. The odd thing is, you’re still able to walk, talk, and do almost anything else that the living are able to do. This storyline captured my imagination immediately. I couldn’t wait to find out how the main character would react to such an unusual post-death existence. The surreal ending worked perfectly for a tale that mixed science fiction and the ordinariness of real life so seamlessly.

“Breach of Contract” followed an oil company employee who was trying to negotiate with a Native American tribe who had been purposefully damaging oil wells and other equipment that the company owned. While most of the short stories in this anthology were able to fully share their ideas in a handful of pages or less, this one would have really benefitted from some more development. Everything moved so quickly in it that I struggled to keep up with what was currently happening. I also was never quite sure what the narrator’s motivation was for sticking around once they realized what was going on with their assignment.

In “Teller of Tales,” Susan was determined to see a mysterious group of visitors called the Rustics even though her elders had barred children and teenagers from being in the same room as them. There were so many unexpected plot twists that I couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. I also enjoyed how much attention the narrator paid to the small details of how Susan’s community worked and what the main character thought of what was happening around her. I can’t say anything more specific about this without giving away spoilers, but it was really well done.

It took me a little while to figure out what was going on with “The Trouble-Men.” The main character in it has tried a few different techniques to deal with a horrifying group of creatures who can kill a person in an instant. What I found slightly confusing at first was how little time was spent describing who the Trouble-Men were and why the protagonist was so terrified of them. This confusion was quickly cleared up, though, and once I knew what was happening I shuddered my way through the rest of it. This was by far the creepiest section of this collection.

I’d recommend You Have Been Murdered and Other Stories to anyone who enjoys imaginative science fiction as much as I do.

Filed Under: Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction/Fantasy Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

A Stalled Ox by Dean Moses

February 23, 2016 By Leave a Comment

Layout 1
A Stalled Ox by Dean Moses
Publisher: Black Hill Press
Genre: Suspense/Mystery, Horror, Contemporary, Action/Adventure
Length: Short Story (120 pages)
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

An isolated religious cult has reportedly been consuming meat while the rest of the planet has been forced to live a life without it. Presuming this sect has resorted to cannibalism, two agents from an organization known simply as The Agency are dispatched to investigate. Will they find evidence of humans eating one another? Or is something even stranger taking place?

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Howard was such an interesting main character. What I liked the most about him was how much time he spent trying new things when a previous idea didn’t work out for whatever reason. This is exactly the kind of behavior I’d expect to see in someone who has his occupation. Observing him do it so often made me like and trust him even more than I would have otherwise.

This story included a lot of telling the readers what a scene was about instead of showing me how it was unfolding. As excited as I was by the premise, I had trouble emotionally connecting to the characters because of this disconnect. It would have been so helpful to have more details about what was happening and what Howard and Linda were thinking about as they worked on their case together. This is something that I was really expecting to love. It included many important elements of what I look for in a great book, but this specific issue made it hard for me to lose myself in the plot.

The horror themes were handled nicely. It’s rare for me to stumble across a mystery that includes this kind of material, so I was quite interested in seeing how the author was planning to blend them together. What surprised me the most about the horror was how quickly it began to show up. This wasn’t something I was expecting, but it did work well with everything else that was going on.

Give A Stalled Ox a try if you’re in the mood for something dark.

Filed Under: Horror, Mystery/Suspense, Reviews Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The Dark at the End of the Tunnel by Taylor Grant

February 12, 2016 By Leave a Comment

dark
The Dark at the End of the Tunnel by Taylor Grant
Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Horror, Paranormal, Contemporary
Length: Short Story (112 pages)
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

Discover what happens when:

– A wealthy industrialist awakens after ten years in suspended animation, and finds out that the horrors of the past can never be left behind.

– A lonely man realizes that he’s gradually vanishing from existence, into a nightmarish limbo of his own making.

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– A woman learns that the imaginary voices that haunt the delusional and criminally insane are, in fact, real.

This remarkable collection of short fiction exposes the terrors that hide beneath the surface of our ordinary world, behind people’s masks of normalcy, and lurking in the shadows at the farthest reaches of the universe.

Almost anything can be terrifying if you look at it the right way.

The main character in “The Silent Ones” had a peculiar problem: even though the post office claimed nothing was out of the ordinary, he hadn’t been receiving his mail. What made it all even more bizarre was that no one else seemed to notice how upset he was by this. I read a lot of science fiction, and I’ve never seen anything like this story before. It reminded me why I enjoy this genre so much, especially once the plot progressed and the main character started noticing other strange developments in his life. Seeing how an otherwise mild-mannered guy reacted to all of these weird things made me wish for a sequel. I would have really liked to know what happened next!

There were certain things about “Gods and Devils” that never made sense to me. The storyline was about a space ship’s captain, Vega, who comes out of stasis only to realize that something horribly violent has taken place while he and all of the other humans on board were unconscious while en route to a new home. His confusion and panic was completely justifiable at first. Had he been an ordinary person who wasn’t in charge of the safety of so many other people, his later actions wouldn’t have been so jarring. I had a lot of trouble understanding why someone with as much training and experience as one would need to be a captain would react the way he did later on in the plot, though. It might have made sense for someone who wasn’t particularly intelligent, but it wasn’t at all what I would have expected from a professional with his background.

In “Show and Tell,” Jacob has been sent to his school psychologist’s office to discuss a series of disturbing drawings he created. The pictures showed medical equipment and other things that most children don’t have experience with at Jacob’s age, so his psychologist was curious to see where the boy had learned about them and why he was so obsessed with them. What I liked the most about this tale was how straightforward it was. The narrator laid everything out methodically and didn’t dance around the topic once it became obvious what was happening. While I did figure out the twist early on, it was still interesting to see if my theory was correct. The ending was also nicely handled. It fit in well with everything else that had been established about Jacob and his home life earlier on.

I’d recommend The Dark at the End of the Tunnel to anyone who likes the dark and sometimes gory side of science fiction.

Filed Under: Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction/Fantasy Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Flowers in a Dumpster by Mark Allan Gunnells

February 5, 2016 By Leave a Comment

flowers
Flowers in a Dumpster by Mark Allan Gunnells
Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Horror, Paranormal, Contemporary
Length: Short Story (144 pages)
Rating: 4 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

The world is full of beauty and mystery. In these 17 tales, Gunnells will take you on a journey through landscapes of light and darkness, rapture and agony, hope and fear.

A post-apocalyptic landscape where it is safer to forget who you once were… An unusual support group comprised of cities dying of a common illness… A porn star that has opened himself up to demonic forces… Two men battling each other to the death who discover they have much in common… A woman whose masochistic tendencies may be her boyfriend’s ruin… A writer whose new friendship proves a danger to his marriage and his sanity.
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Let Gunnells guide you through these landscapes where magnificence and decay co-exist side by side. Come pick a bouquet from these Flowers in a Dumpster.

There’s something lurking around the corner. Do you hear it?

I don’t normally suggest skipping ahead in anthologies, but I have to make an exception for “Land of Plenty.” What intrigued me the most about the main character, Isabella, was how emotionally connected she was to her grandfather. They both lived in a small, peaceful community where everyone’s needs are always met. There was a dark secret lurking behind their quiet success, though, that made me shudder. I deeply enjoyed the process of slowly peeling back the layers of their society. This could have easily been a full-length novel because of how richly detailed the world building was, although it honestly did work beautifully as a short story.

There were a handful of stories that I thought could have used a little more polishing. The fact that this happened only a couple of times in the entire collection is impressive, though. I simply had some trouble figuring out what a couple of the tales were trying to communicate to the audience. “The Support Group” was one such example of this. The plot about how different cities reacted to a terrible parasite that couldn’t be cured by any known methods. The use of metaphors to show what was going on was excellent. I cringed and laughed my way through a lot of them, but the plot twists were revealed so quickly and briefly that I struggled to understand what they meant. I’m still not entirely sure that my interpretation of the hints was accurate. It would have been really helpful to have a few more clues about what was going on here as the parts I did figure out were fascinating.

In “The Locked Tower,” a writer named Alec becomes obsessed with seeing what is hidden in the top of the tower in one of the buildings at his alma mater. The more the people who work there try to convince him to stop asking about it, the deeper his desire to see the tower for himself grows. What I enjoyed the most about this character’s quest was how much foreshadowing was used to hint at what was going on. Such an intelligent character needed a good reason to ignore all of the signals he was receiving about the contents of that tower. The foreshadowing only seemed to make his curiosity grow stronger which was an interesting thing to witness as well.

Flowers in a Dumpster was the best book I’ve read from Crystal Lake Publishing so far! I’d strongly recommend it to anyone who enjoys modern horror.

Filed Under: Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction/Fantasy Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Gingerbread by Victor A. Davis

January 6, 2016 By Leave a Comment

GINGER
Gingerbread by Victor A. Davis
Publisher: Self-published
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Horror, Contemporary
Length: Short Story (20 pages)
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

When Edgar challenges his friend Arainy to sneak into the candy factory and steal sweets, she resists, even though she desperately wants to prove herself. She knows the risks. She knows the Candy Man has caught Eddie before, but intrigue gets the better of her. This is not a children’s bedtime story. It is a dark retelling of Peter Rabbit.

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The foreshadowing was handled nicely. It was subtle enough that a reader would have to pay close attention to what the narrator was hinting at in order to pick up on what was going on. I really enjoyed having these brief glimpses of what could be in store for the main characters. Finding them only made me more eager to see how it would all end, especially as more and more clues were revealed.

I would have liked to see more time spent developing the ending. There were a few things about it that I never quite understood. The pacing of it was so fast that there simply wasn’t the time to explain everything in detail. While I definitely appreciate it when authors expect me to do some legwork in order to figure a tale out, I needed a few more hints about what was happening in the last scene in particular.

The science fiction elements of the storyline didn’t show up right away. For a short time, I actually wondered if this was the right genre at all because of how everything was structured. There are excellent reasons why Mr. Davis wrote it this way, though, and once I figured out what those reasons were I liked the plot even more than I originally had. Arranging everything this way was definitely the right decision for this particular story.

Gingerbread made me shudder. I’d recommend it to anyone who would like to read something scary.

Filed Under: Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction/Fantasy Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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