Ritual by Steve Stred is a novella with some serious bite. It’s quite a difficult book to read on many levels, its no nonsense approach to taboo subjects causes an unease from pretty much page one and continues through the book to its grisly conclusion. You want to look away at numerous points, but Stred
I think I’ve arrived late at the Steve Stred party, but with his latest and phenomenal dark fantasy epic Piece of Me – I’m sure to be gorging myself on more of his fabulous offerings for some time to come (as of writing I’ve dived into his dark horror offering in the shape of ‘The
Well, here at STORGY we’ve been following the career of Priya Sharma with great attention and her collection All The Fabulous Beasts was a highlight of our recent reading – which let us just add went on to win the Shirley Jackson Award for singled-authored collection in 2018. So, when we heard that she’d upped
GumShoe Blues is Brit Grit and self-proclaimed “screwball noir” author Paul D. Brazill’s latest novelette, completed with a few short stories shedding light on some of the characters and events. The result is dark, witty, farcical and thoroughly entertaining. The story follows its detective anti-hero Peter Ord on his numerous missions. “Ordy”, as the unsavoury
Fox 8 by George Saunders is a feat of great storytelling, it’s an enchanting and darkly comic fable centred around the life of Fox 8 who reveals through his unique voice the greed of man and the destruction of nature. If anyone doesn’t know who George Saunders is, where have you been living…under a rock,
‘Your brother’s with the Judder.’ If you are not aware of The Eden Book Society – where have you been? Dead Ink have been able to obtain the rights to their back catalogue and are releasing titles over the course of the year, with each one being a macabre little slice of horror. There is
Elevation is a great book. It is of course written by the master of horror Stephen King, so we are already quite excited about what is on offer, but with Elevation we have King at his oh so weird and oh so pleasant. Elevation is not a straight out horror, let me get that on
The novella-in-flash is a difficult genre to master, with the double pressure of telling a convincing story whilst achieving an individual flash fiction story for each chapter. With every word counted and counting, it doesn’t leave much room for hesitation or rambling and one can’t afford the luxury of a couple of weaker chapters as
The charm of Van Llewyn’s writing lies in the simplicity of the language. You’re not expecting anything bad to happen. You’re dancing along in the half-poetic-haze of short sentences, well-chosen words from the less obscure end of the vocabulary range, and a wonderful rhythm of punctuation– highly sophisticated starts and stops. (A feeling heightened by
A short story collection can be like a good whiskey, it goes down easy, but once it hits your stomach there’s a burning that leaves a lasting impression. Two Dogs at One Dog Inn by David John Griffin, is like someone handing you 11 shots and one tumbler of whiskey. Some of the stories are
