“Big Bad” made for an interesting end to the Creature Feature collection. It’s the only story in it that fits within any of my preconceived expectations. It’s about a werewolf. The werewolf follows normal horror werewolf rules (as opposed to paranormal werewolf rules), and the story has a lot of gore and tense moments in it.
I stared at the adult person, or adult person-shaped thing, standing there. They didn’t do anything at first. I risked glancing back to make sure that there wasn’t a second ghost person in the mirrored corner. There wasn’t. That didn’t make me feel better.
“Best of Luck” is pulling as my favorite story in the collection. Although “Ankle Snatcher” is the only one that scared me, this one was the most fun to read. I actively wish there were more pages, that the story didn’t have to be over so soon.
“In Bloom” just kept missing. Each time the horror felt like it was going to build to something, each time I thought the concept was going to hit harder, it just failed to work.
The open door of The Phobia Box filled my vision. The idea that I could fall into the damn thing occurred to me, and I stepped back from it.
If there was an award for the most middle-of-the-road story in this collection, “It Waits in the Woods” would currently win.
I’m not that easily scared, but “Ankle Snatcher” genuinely freaked me out. The night I read it, I obeyed all the rules outlined about how not to get brutally killed by this monster that lives underneath the bed. It’s been a few days since then, and I am still overly cautious when I’m falling asleep.
The seasons are changing. It will only get colder. Autumn, and all it brings, is here to stay. And, as we cross that threshold, a pair of mystical beings has a routine. It must happen each and every year.
I Found Puppets Living In My Apartment Walls has two qualities that have continued to stand out to me even after some time since I read it. One: it has an extremely unwieldy name to put into an article. And two: it is one of the scariest, most unnerving, most creative pieces of horror fiction I’ve come across as a reader.
As odd as it is for a horror fan to say, “The Pram” is the first thing I’ve read by Joe Hill, the son of the most famous horror writer in the world, Stephen King. But, from what I’ve heard through the grapevine of criticism, they share a fair number of stylistic flourishes.
Timothy has one chance to make a wish. But is this “magic bird” even real, or just some robot playing a prank?
The Call of the Flame initially worried me that it would be a repeat of my usual concerns with Epic Fantasy. In my very recent review of The Legacy Saga, I talked about how stories in this genre can lack strong inciting incidents or story hooks because it’s too busy with worldbuilding. And several times, The Call of the Flame almost fell right into the same trap but miraculously continued to pull back and keep things understandable.
