Review: Escalating Tension
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 26, 2012
As a love of short horror stories, I enjoyed this collection.Matt Hults is a master at building tension. His stories start, in a manner reminiscent of Victorian gothic fiction, with a subtly disquieting situation, something everyday with just a minor problem, creating a sense of foreboding. Then things get worse. And worse. And worse. As the action escalates, so does characters' fear, and with it, the readers', spanning the range from suspense to terror. Now and then, the author allows the reader to hope and almost relax for a moment before the tension escalates yet further.The starting situations are such normal, everyday events, that they feel almost familiar to the reader: the car breakdown in an inconvenient location, the appointment with the estate agent to view a property, the danger warning printed on a plastic bag. The characters deal with those hazards and annoyances in a normal manner... until events take distinctly "not normal" turns, and characters struggle to suspend their disbelief and survive.I first read Matt Hults' story "Feeding Frenzy" in the anthology "Best New Zombie Tales" (edited by James Roy Daley). I loved it there and sought out more of the author's work.