Review: YUP!  I TOOK THE BAIT...AND I AM NOT SORRY I DID.  This is very much a worthwhile read!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 2, 2012
Horror stories are not the normal genre I read.  I like them, but not all that much.  Well due to the recommendation of one of my Amazon friends here, R. Nicholson, I was encouraged to give this one a try.  Hey, it was free and it was short...I figured why not?  This is especially true because Nicholson has never led me astray once, and if he gave the thing five stars, then I was sure it was good...he is much more stingy with the star ratings than I am.Well I have to tell you folks that this author is a rascal.  I say this because this is a "teaser" story; a story to lure you in so that you will buy his novel when it is published.  I am here to tell you that the author did his job and did it well.  This thing had me hooked from page one and at the end I was quite peeved in that I realized the author had indeed hooked me and that I was going to have to finish this thing off.  Grrrr.This work was written by a new author and we can see little tell-tale signs here and there that it is a first work.  This is not big deal in this case though because I can assure you that the author is a very skilled writer and quite obviously a master story teller.  His work is a delight.  We can only speculate at this time what this work would and will look like if it had a professional editor drag it through the ringer.  If it is as good as it is as stand, can you just imagine?  Sigh.The story starts simple.  A father and son are fishing an isolated pond.  All is well with the world.  You are thinking where or where is the horror?  Well, the author delivers it soon enough.  I fish isolated little lakes, ponds and streams so this one hit pretty close to home for me and I can tell you that it was absolutely creepy!I liked the way the author shifted his narrative between the son, the father and then the author.  This is a ploy I have seen before.  It is not for everyone but this sort of thing suits my reading tastes perfectly.  It is something different and with all the books I read, I need different now and then.Of course my only whine is that this snippet was too short.  I wanted more.  This though is one of the reasons that the Kindle has recreated a whole new world for us.  Since the death of the big named magazines back in the 1950s there have been fewer and fewer outlets for new author to show there stuff.  Publishers are only going with "big name" authors and our literary world has suffered greatly for it as many of the "big name" authors are truly wretched by any standard and are feeding us crud.  This Kindle phenomena has allowed us fanatic reader's choices; choices that we simply have not had available to us for forty years or more.  This is a good thing.It is difficult to write reviews on short work such as this; for me anyway, as I do not like giving away spoilers.  I would strongly recommend though that you download this one and give it a shot.  I feel you will be missing a good read if you don't.Don BlankenshipThe Ozarks