Review: Death Sparkles Anthology
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 01 30, 2013
(I received a free copy of this ebook in exchange for leaving a review. I do not believe my review is skewed by having received a free copy.)This book reads like one of the many writing challenges you might be given as part of a writer's group. In this case, everyone received the same prompt: to include "The diamond necklace dangled from the dead woman's hand." somewhere within the story. In the first story, "Literal Interpretation," this was less literal than in the others. As you would expect in a group of writers, the results were very different, and some were quite enjoyable. Unfortunately, the 'diamonds' in this anthology were rare to find, and buried among the rest.Death Sparkles has a subtitle of "Scary Short Stories." I believe this is misleading - I would not consider any of these to be an actual 'scary story.' Many of them involved a crime, others involved murder, but that alone does not make a story scary.My least favorite story was "Trophy Wife." What set me off from the start was the repeated capitalization of He/Him/His. Sure, I get that the author is attempting to show how important this man is to the main character, perhaps even deify him, but it got really old, really fast. It was also a little unbelievable - she'd be put under with chloroform for a breast enlargement, but then kept wide awake and aware as holes are being drilled into her?My favorite story was "Persephone's Progeny" although I would have liked more. It's easy to believe that a man, working a long way from his wife, might make his robot take on her appearance. It's also easy to believe that the robot might get jealous of the wife. But what happens next? The author already set the stage for how bad the robot was at mimicking true human emotion. Plus, the whole requirement of recharging every night thing. So how long will things continue the way they are at the end of the story?There were a number of typos that wouldn't get caught by a spellchecker but should have been caught by the editors, such as words missing or a phrase repeated twice.Some of the stories were really too short and did not read as an actual story, more as an excerpt from something that should have been longer and more thought out. Some of the endings did not make much sense. Other stories often made a huge leap to go from one scene to another, then the missing bit is then told to the reader. Why cut out some of the action - especially if that is the best (or only) action in the entire story?Overall, I am giving this story two stars. I would have liked the stories to have been better written and with better editing done. The idea to link every story by the same phrase was cute, but I am not sure how well it worked out. Overall, I was a little bored and started eye rolling every time that phrase came up in the last few stories.