Review: More Tricks than Treats Here
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 06 17, 2014
In one of my recent reviews of a Kindle anthology, I commented that many of these anthologies offered the best values on Amazon, giving readers exposure to a number of authors for a price well below the selling price of the various works individually. Then I read "Tales from Dark Places," a dreary exception to the rule. The price for the anthology is right (it's usually free), but this is a case of readers getting just what they pay for.The anthology consists of nine short, short stories that take up about fifty pages (the rest of the book consists of author biographies and bibliographies). I have nothing against short, short stories per se; even though they are generally just a setup and a punchline, a well written short short can be quite entertaining. However, many of these so-called stories are not actual stories; they are pastiches, bits and pieces thrown together by the authors with the intent of creating a creepy mood. In fact, instead of actual stories, many of them sound more like letters to the editor of a horror magazine (Dear Editor: Something strange happened to me the other day... Anyway, that's shat happened. Sincerely ...).Truth be told, it's very difficult to set up a genuinely scary premise and then resolve it satisfactorily in the space of five pages or less. Horror requires setting a mood, and, in that short a space, most authors can either tell a brief story or establish a scary mood but not both. Most of these stories try to set a scary mood but fail even in that effort because the authors are unable to immerse the reader in the appropriate atmosphere in that brief a story.The longer stories in the collection are generally better than the shorter ones, but the only two decent stories in the collection are the first two. "Dinner, Date and Autopsy" by D. C. Rogers is a variant on the familiar theme of a person being paralyzed and mistaken for dead, then trying desperately to let others know that she is actually alive before it's too late. Author Rogers throws an original twist into this one that makes the paralyzed woman's predicament even more desperate. I also enjoyed "Alone" by Sonya Dodd, about a man troubled by a recurring violent nightmare until he finally realizes what's causing it.Unfortunately, the rest of the stories (most of them considerably shorter than these first two) wind up being very repetitive and neither scary nor interesting. To make matters worse, a couple of them attempt "surprise" explanations at the end that fall completely flat and actually came across as patronizingly annoying. The overall effect of reading these stories was roughly the same as that of surfing YouTube and watching a handful of clips from random horror films.The ultimate goal of an anthology such as this one is to interest readers in purchasing some of the other works of the various authors. This anthology fell far short of its goal; I had absolutely no interest in pursuing works by any of these writers. All in all, this anthology has two decent, but not great, stories and seven more that range from mediocre to decidedly dull. My only lasting impression of "Tales from Dark Places" was that the "dark places" from which these tales came were the rejection drawers of most of the publishers to whom they were submitted.