Horrors!: 365 Scary Stories – A Full Year of Horror #4
The horror short-short isn’t easy to master, but more than 100 of the genre’s critically acclaimed authors & hottest up-&-comers have taken a stab at it in Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, an anthology that contains a short tale for every day of the year. Steve Rasnic Tem, Wm F. Nolan, Tom Piccirilli, Yvonne Navarro, Peter Atkins, Brian Hodge, Martin Mundt & 166 others give you short, sharp shocks.
I will be reading one story each day and a weekly wrap-up review of the seven stories that I’ve read over the week.
If you missed the first post you can find it here and follow along from there. I hope you will. Misery and terror love company. Especially tasty company, heh heh heh…
– S&S-
Horrors! 365/7 : 01/21/17 – 01/27/17
1. Be Careful What You Say – David Niall Wilson 01/21/17
Synopsis:
Be careful what you say around kids. You never know how their minds will twist it.
Review:
Wasn’t crazy about this one. It was meh and kind of made kids look stupid (the way I read it anyway)
2. Bedtime Story – Steve Eller 01/22/17
Synopsis:
A father tells his daughter a very dark and disturbing bedtime story.
Review:
This one was a tad meh for me as well. The story is like a reverse Scheherazade in a way. The reason it’s blah to me is at that age I was reading Alvin Schwartz’s ‘Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark’. And the story he tells her isn’t that much different than a Grimm fairy tale.
3. Being of One Mind – Benjamin Adams 01/23/17
Synopsis:
A man takes his wife on a picnic, hoping for a pleasant day before asking for a divorce. Any Lovecraft reader will tell you that Dunwich is not the best place to go on a picnic.
Review:
I like the Lovecraftian touch. The only thing that beggars belief is why on earth would you bring a cat to a picnic?! It would be the same story without the cat so it just makes the story a little sillier than it needs to be.
4. Best Friends – Linda J. Dunn 01/24/17
Synopsis:
A two page story about the very definition of ‘frenemies’
Review:
Short, sweet and to the point.
5. Beware the Truancy Officer – Leslie What 01/25/17
Synopsis:
A school truancy officer takes her job to the next level, teaching negligent parents a lesson of their own.
Review:
I really liked this story. The main character is a bit psychotic but her heart’s in the right place.
6. The Big One – Lisa Lepovetsky 01/26/17
Synopsis:
A man takes his girlfriend out fishing for the Big One. The Big One needs some very specific bait.
Review:
I always like big, unusual fish stories. Probably because lakes can be really creepy, especially when you can’t see the bottom. You never know what can be lurking under the water.
7. Billy – Adam Niswander 01/27/17
Synopsis:
Strangers show up in a small town. When the strangers start killing people, Billy’s parents arm themselves and go to town. After nightfall they return but Billy doesn’t want to let them in. Their teeth look funny.
Review:
Told entirely through the little boy’s eyes it was a pretty good story. The voice of the little boy sounds authentic to his age.
Favorite of the Week:
This was kind of a blah week for the stories I guess. Next week will be better I hope. Of these though, I think I liked Beware the Truancy Officer and Billy the best. Beware the Truancy Officer had a nice little twist to it. Billy was told well from a child’s perspective.
That wraps up this week! I will be back again next Friday as usual with your weekly dose of horror. After next Friday, however, I will be switching to a bi-monthly format, doing two weeks at a time, rather than one. Let me know which format you guys prefer.
