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Book Review: The Corona Book of Horror Stories edited by Lewis Williams


The Corona Book Of Horror Stories edited by Lewis Williams

Corona Books UK, 2017

ISBN-13:  978-0-9932472-6-2

Available: Paperback, eBooks(Kindle)

 

The Corona Book of Horror Stories is a collection of 16 up-and-coming writers of incredible imagination.  There are a variety of stories that cover the gamut of the horror genre;  there is something for nearly everyone.  Anything that can be used to scare, terrorize and, give you the creeps is on tap here, from the mundane to the extraordinary.  Variety is the spice of life.  And death.

This was an interesting collection of new writers.  Most of them are in and from the U.K. with a few U.S. writers mixed in.  Each story was edited with the author’s origin in mind, so the grammar switched up occasionally.  The variety was fun, as I did not know what topic I would get with each new story.

However, there were some stories I loved and some I did not.  Those I really liked were: A Health And Safety Issue (I can relate); Bad Boys Don’t Get Dessert (shocking at the end); The Ornament (it actually gave me the creeps); Death By Appointment (a contemporary interview with Death.  Timeless!)  The stories I didn’t like either took too long to really get rolling or just needed grammatical and editorial help.

In the end, although the quality of the stories varied, The Corona Book of Horror Stories is worth reading to see what some new writers are putting together.  I have not read any of these author’s works before.

 

Contains:  Adult language, adult situations, graphic images and violence

Reviewed by Aaron Fletcher

Posted on March 15, 2018 by , 1 comment

Book Review: Bloody Kids by Andrew Holmes

Bloody Kids by Andrew Holmes

Sasquatch Books, 2017

ASIN: B078437KK2

Available: Kindle edition

 

Bloody Kids by Andrew Holmes is a gory thriller about a rural English town that is rotten to its core.  A rich farmer controls the town and most of its inhabitants, including the police, much as lords of the manor did in medieval England.  He entertains and controls many of the village men with annual hunting bacchanals and a clandestine brothel at the Lizard Farm.  A sadistic widow runs the Farm and is the madam for comely ‘cleaning women’.  She physically and psychologically abuses her orphaned or abandoned ‘foster children’, who work the Farm.

 

Things begin to go awry when the widow becomes demented, and loses control over the once-cowed children.  As they take control of the Farm, their base instincts come to the fore.  Think of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.  The children begin to abuse and torture the prostitutes.

 

The rich farmer’s son-in-law takes his young son on a winter picnic in a field near the Farm, and the boy disappears.  An intensive search leads nowhere, and a local veteran Detective Inspector is ordered to investigate.

 

It’s a tangled web.  The DI has had a midlife crisis and an affair with a hostess-prostitute at the bacchanals, who is also the nanny/cleaning woman for the children.  Although she ends the affair, she still communicates with the DI by cell phone, until the boy disappears.

 

A boy’s body is found in a gravel pit.  It seems that no one is innocent.  Mutilations (yes, even with a chainsaw), torture, and murder, crescendo to a gory, blazing denouement on a bone-chilling, snowy night.  As in a morality play, most of the malefactors get their just deserts.

 

The story is fast-paced, and keeps the reader engaged.  Setting his story in England, Holmes treats the reader to many English colloquialisms, such as “twee” (quaint), “gutted” (upset) and “gob” (spit, mouth).  Holmes has written many other action/adventure/fantasy/horror novels under the pseudonyms Oliver Bowden and A. E. Moorat.

 

Recommended for teens and adults

 

Contains: violence, gore and sex

Reviewed by Robert D. Yee

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on November 29, 2017 by , Reply