Review: 13 tastes of darkness
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 21, 2014
Paul Brazill is one of the new wave of crime fiction writers that have hit the scene in recent years.  Over the last five years (since 2008), his fiction has appeared in many of the crime fiction anthologies such as Beat to a Pulp, Crimefactory, and Needle.  All of the stories in this short collection of “flash fiction” have appeared in such publications.  So you can either collect all thirteen publications or read this short anthology.These are all good stories.  “The Tut” begins with the unforgettable line:  “After enduring forty-five years of a marriage that was at best, like wading through treacle, Oliver Robinson eventually had enough and smothered his wife with the beige corduroy cushion that he’d accidentally burned with a cigarette two fraught days before.”  Wow, what an entire history Brazill packed into that one sentence!  The second selection “Anger Management” is another short masterpiece.  It is sort of a mood piece, but it is filled with lines like:  “I’ve heard it said that eighteen months of sleep deprivation can drive you crazy.”  You can honestly open up the book to any point in these thirteen stories and find something of interest, some dark haunting poetic line.  “The Friend Catcher” is another short (they are all short) that begins with an amazingly thick line of prose:  “The morning after Charlotte killed her father, the air tasted like lead  and the sky was gun metal grey.”  That’s a whole story right there.Thirteen little gems packed into a short little book.  I enjoyed these little glimpse into the darkness.