Fright! by Matt Martinek

Self published, 2023

ISBN: 9798864210465

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Buy: Amazon.com

This little183 page volume has 19 short stories that vary in quality.  Most are decent: there are a few clunkers mixed in, and a few real hum-dingers as well.  If you like your horror fiction short, this may be worth looking at.

All the stories are written in the first person.  If there is a theme, it’s “very bad people doing random bad things”.  There’s not much in the way of monsters or supernatural material, although  “Blood of My Blood”, a nice little werewolf story, is an exception.  The best stories are undoubtedly “Diary of the Red Spike”,  “WarWolf”, and “The Butterfly of Prometheus”.  “Diary of the Red Spike” gets props for being a serial killer story with some real ingenuity in the murder methods.  “WarWolf” is a clever tale of the government creating war machines, and “Butterfly”…well, just say it’s a crazy take on how art is extremely subjective to the viewer.  One person sees it and throws up in disgust, another sees it and falls in love.  These three alone can pretty much justify purchase of the book.

The rest of the stories, minus the few bombs, hit in the nice middle of the road area.  They are good…not great, but not bad either.  There are grave robbers, a strange “nice guy around town” character, sex dolls that get emotionally attached, it’s an odd mix.  Nothing is new enough to be earth-shattering, but it is creative enough to be entertaining.  These stories do not have happy endings: this is not Disney-style writing.  Be prepared for the bad guys to win.

One thing that might have helped boost the book up a level would have been mixing up the narration perspective. Writing in first person or present tense is all the rage right now, but first person can be pretty limiting.  It does allow for more internal material for the protagonist, but it also limits the ability to narrate and describe, since everything is from the main character’s point of view.  “WarWolf” is one story that feels like it would have benefited from third person narration. Getting some parts from the wolf point of view could have turned a very good story into a real smasher.

Bottom line?  It’s an interesting collection, and at the price, it could be a reasonable pickup for short story fans.

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson