Review: It starts with a chilling poem to give you a sense of this author's tastes and styles and it just gets better from there.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 22, 2014
Pros:Sir Gordon has a wonderful way with words and keeps you on the edge of your seat. There are no discernible holes in any plots and he ties things together very nicely with a touch of a chill in the room.There's some blood and gore involved in some of his stories, but not enough to be offputting and overt. I quickly found myself engrossed in this book, within the first few pages, as Gordon manages to capture the imagination with ease.One of his many strengths is character interactions - the conversations were fluid and easy to follow, you got a feel for the personality of each one without any trouble - as a result, their fear was very real when they came up against their devils.A lot of what is written has an ethereal, dreamlike feel to it, like those moments when you first wake in the middle of night, having heard a noise and not knowing what was hiding in the darkness of your room. You're there, but you're not, you're afraid while still knowing that you are safe, cuddled tightly in your blankets.Horror is not just about scaring the living daylights out of people with cheap gimmicks and thrills and limbs flying all over... True horror is about the deep seated feelings of despair, of suspense and of impending terror.Gordon captures this masterfully... And I commend him. :)Without giving too much away... He offers a wide variety of tales for both the inexperienced and the veteran readers of horror. Some psychological, some fantasy, all superb. From what seem to be waking dreams of haunted persons to downtown streets of modern cities to the backwater outlying villas of old time formalities, I enjoyed reading these stories and hope to see more from this budding horror author.Cons: The book is written in distinct BrE (British English), so if you're an American, keep that in mind. Their punctuation is slightly different from ours. Please don't come posting a bad review here about his 'faulty' grammar. It's not! It's just from a different country! :)Overall, reading this collection of short stories was a wonderful experience. The stories were chilling, the writing (within allowance of the possible differentials in regions) was superb, and I enjoyed scaring myself thoroughly well into the wee hours of the morning. :)