Donald White (2)

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a non-reciprocal review.

The first thing I noticed about this book was the formatting. I had a mobi file, and there were no page breaks. The table of contents starts right under the copyrights (on the same page), and then the story starts right under the table of contents, instead of each having their own pages.

It opens with something to set the scene to connect the stories. That's an interesting enough concept since most short story collections like this don't bother to link them.
However, picturing a bunch of people in robes standing around a stone table and reading the tales can be pretty humorous at moments. Why?

Well, imagine a hooded figure standing in a circle with other cloaked figures, reading a scroll. Now, imagine that cloaked figure reading this from the scroll:
"That pool boy is sooo handsome."

I keep picturing the cloaked figure adding some sass into that line.

The author also threw in lines with exclamation points, which made it read more like a comic book instead of a horror story.
""So do I," she smirked, patting him on the rear!"
"Even in the darkness of the room, he could make out the face of a woman in the reflection behind him!"
"There, in the darkness of his bedroom, was the face of a woman staring back at him!"

There were some good ideas here. For example, in the second story the idea of having children jumping rope to a rhyme, and the rhyme changing to be a little more sinister each time could work well in a scary story.
But the execution was lacking.

For example, I spent much of the second story confused because it goes right into mentioning the "realms" and "the mist" without explaining anything about them. I had no idea what the setting was supposed to be or why the main character seemed to find it all normal. The text bounced back and forth without making it coherent, so he would be entering "the mist" and then suddenly he would be somewhere where kids were jumping rope.

"Lady Killer", I think, was one of my favorites both in the story and writing style. Both of the characters were interesting, and there could probably be a series written about Lisa. "The Hound" was also pretty good. "The Thing in the Shadows" was fine, too, although it had purple prose breaking up the story that I thought was unnecessary.

"Temple of the Life-Giver" felt like way too much was crammed into a short story.

The writing improved significantly from "Lady Killer" and on, but it still maintained the issues the previous stories did to a lesser extent. When I started reading the book, I thought I was going to end up giving it 2 stars after the first few stories. It started off with way too many italic thoughts, and the writing in the beginning didn't build suspense for me (you can see some of the quotes from above). The latter parts of the book felt a lot different. The characters were built up better in most of them and the writing was more polished.
Still, because the writing did get better later on I bumped it up to 3 stars. It would be great if an editor looked over the work to fix it up.… (altro)