Review: A quick trek through dark, uncharted wilderness
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 12, 2013
Reanimated corpses, bogeymen, aliens, angels, ancient legends . . . there's a diverse world to be explored along the Midnight Paths we travel with author Joe Hart as our guide. The journey won't be safe, it'll be littered with despair and gruesome encounters, and you might wonder if you'll ever make it out alive. There are ten stops along the way, each as terrifying as the last:PCA is slow to get into its stride but contains a great finish which leaves a gory image. The Unfamiliar is a weird story, albeit in a good way, and the scene of a broken man walking in a desolated landscape littered with bones reminded me of one of my stories. It has a "what comes around goes around" kind of ending that adds a nice touch.You Sure Are Calm, Cowboy gets plus marks for its gore value, but it didn't really seem to have any purpose, and I wondered what the point of this story was. This is compensated by Angel Charlie--a great little story, short but laden with good images and a delightful twist with a final line that delivers the perfect punch.Old Dog is an entertaining, quick read with a delicious touch of revenge, which leads into Pale Man, the longest story in the book but also one of the best. It contains a great start and introduction, a perfectly paced middle, and an inevitable end--but one that was tainted slightly by POV head-hopping that is a pet hate of mine.The Man in the Room is an eerie ghost tale with a nice little twist to end. Stress-induced explosions aren't the norm, except in Joe Hart's world, but The Exploding Man was probably the weakest of all the stories. Yet it's still a read that isn't altogether disappointing.Adrift details the diary entries of a man lost at sea, revealing a macabre tale of despair and forlorn hope. It's one of the best stories in the book, extremely well written, and delightfully devoid of a Hollywood ending which is always a pleasing aspect of good horror. Finally, Blackjack gives us a casino with a difference and odds that are way too high. Another good story, about addiction at a cost, which is fortunately not ruined by its obvious ending.The author's decision to include a section dedicated to his ponderings on why he wrote the stories and where his ideas came from is a nice touch, as it's always entertaining to learn how other twisted minds work.Midnight Paths: A Collection of Dark Horror, by Joe Hart, is a quick trek through dark, uncharted wilderness--it is not a leisurely Sunday stroll. The places he takes us aren't for the faint of heart or those with a tendency to gag at the merest scent of spilled intestines, so you should think twice about making this journey. I advise you to walk these paths, though, as it's well worth it.But you might want to take a torch or a weapon of some kind, and the bigger the better.You never know what you might find out there.