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 sequel to Eidolon Avenue: The First Feast (“a great read…powerful and jarring” – Cemetery Dance) returns to the voracious Eidolon as it savors The Second Feast.
A narcoleptic man in apartment 2A battles a vengeful past determined to rob him of everything as he runs from the barbaric disaster of a delusional love. A woman in 2B, reinventing herself to please a callous boyfriend, discovers the horrors that wait in the shadows of her self-renovation. The man in 2C, a teacher at the nearby Catholic girl’s school, collapses beneath the brutal consequences of his lecherous desires. An older woman in 2D, after decades dedicated to the church, is cornered at last by the grisly carnage beating at the hollow center of her faith. And a college student in 2E, hungry to escape an ignored life of invisible anonymity, finds herself captured between the pages of a ravenous book.
All thrown into their own private hell as every cruel choice, every drop of spilled blood, every silent, complicit moment of cowardice is remembered, resurrected and relived to feed the ancient evil that lives on Eidolon Avenue.
Title: Eidolon Avenue – The Second Feast| Series: Eidolon Avenue | Author: Jonathan Winn | Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing | Pub. Date: March 24th, 2021 | Pages: 175 | Language: English | ASIN: B08YZ2ZYXM | Genre: Horror Collection | Source: Received from the publisher for review consideration | Unstarred
Eidolon Avenue: The Second Feast Book Review
Eidolon Avenue: The Second Feast is the second book in the Eidolon Avenue horror collection series. It seems very much like a series that is tied together by location, rather than the people or characters involved.
So I didn’t feel ‘lost’ while reading. It’s made up of five stories, all connected by an apartment building on Eidolon Avenue. While the idea of a Bad Place preying on the lost, the guilty and the broken isn’t exactly new, it reminded me of Silent Hill, thematically and I was intrigued.
There may have been no previous road in the own of Silent Hill but if a new map were drawn up Eidolon Avenue would certainly be on there. I think the author captured that idea well and I liked the concept. However, the writer’s style didn’t quite mesh with what I typically enjoy so I would urge others to give it try as it may suit someone else more.
Eidolon Avenue: The Second Feast is a brief read of five short stories with one common thread – the apartment building on Eidolon Avenue. Each story is set up by apartment number with the story title (subtitle?) underneath.
I wasn’t too crazy about the writing style. For short stories I believe they could have been shorter. They drag on a bit too long even after the point has been made or the end heavily foreshadowed. The characters themselves were definitely not the kind you can really dig into, except maybe in the second story (scrape) but even then her choices were very hard for me to understand but I felt empathy for her. And, strangely, the inner turmoil of some of the other characters were gone into more when, frankly, I didn’t care to know more about them. Most of the tenants seem to well deserve their fates but the stories themselves seemed to want me to lean toward hoping for their redemption, however slight it may be, when nope. Not going to feel empathy to a predator or a murderer.
The stories, as mentioned above, should have worked as short, sharp icepicks of horror but the meandering style just didn’t gel with that.
I would also like to add a few content warnings. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but they should be some that readers should be aware of:
I would recommend it if you don’t mind stories that jump around and have a meandering style. Weird for the sake of weird is hard to keep up effectively and once you’ve heard a slightly different thought phrased a bit differently on almost every page of each story it becomes tiresome, not intriguing.
You can purchase a copy of this book via your normal retailer, but please consider purchasing it from a local indie bookshop instead. It can be found here at IndieBound or at Bookshop. Please note the Bookshop link is an affiliate link and each purchase you make through it helps to support Sci-Fi & Scary and keep the site running.
GracieKat was the first co-host of Sci-Fi & Scary, Lilyn’s partner-in-crime, and sub-head of the Kali Krew. She reviews horror books, movies, and games for the site. She also does a weekly Focus on the Frightful feature, and is the site list-maker. She is also in control of the Sci-Fi & Scary podcast which will relaunch soon.
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