A collection of thirteen short stories by various authors in the horror genre, such as Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine. Each story is about something different, sometimes a story has a person as the "bad guy" and sometimes it is supernatural.

The variety. I usually go after short story books anyway, because it's what I write. But in this book there was a wide variety of samples of what you can do with the horror genre.

There were a few things. For one, the book was badly edited. There were a fair share of grammatical errors, numbers sometimes appeared in place of letters, things of that nature. A few of the authors also made some basic writing mistakes, and they were completely overlooked even though they took away from the story (one was so bad, I had to completely skip the story). Also, the book contains a decent two part story, but I didn't like how it was set up. Part one opened the book, and part two closed it. But by the time you read the rest of the stories and get to part two of the story, you have lost track of part one. And this particular story is one in which you really need to know exactly what is going on throughtout the entire story, because it can be very confusing.

Read it again. I normally wait at least a year, maybe longer, to reread any book, but I had the urge to go through and read some of the stories again.

Wasn't really the author. It was edited by T. Pines. There are thirteen different authors in this book.

It is very fast paced, it has a lot of variety, and is a great learning experience for writers of all genres. I say that because you can use the errors in the book to your own advantage, and mark them off so you don't do the same thing yourself. For horror writers, it shows what can be done with the genre besides your normal werewolves and vampires.

Anyone who goes crazy with errors in spelling, grammar, editing, ect. may find this one tough to get through. And some of the stories are really cheesy and rushed.

Short story books don't usually capture a writer's best works, so don't go in to this book thinking it will be the next horror masterpiece. The stories are good, but in many of them there was a lot of room for improvement, and some stories could have really gone a lot farther.



However, as I said, it's a good learning experience for writers. You can pick out where things could be worked on, and maybe expand it yourself in your mind. Think of what you would have done if you got the idea first. You can also pick out some of the writing mistakes these authors made, and highlight them so you can perfect your own writing.



This is definetly a good bathroom book, but not a tea on the porch kind of book, if you catch my drift.

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Created Mar 31, 2003 at 12:52am • Submit your own review...