Tag Archives: Horror

Haunted Houses Creak: A Horror Collection by M. H. Altis

“I once read a F. Scott Fitzgerald (F. Scott Fitzgerald? what he’d do to you?) short story collection that gave a bit of context and descriptions for all the stories within, and I liked it. Not necessarily the stories themselves, but the idea. So, here were [sic] are — shouts out Scotty F regardless.

“Be warned: some of these stories may be truly scary, and some are definitely on the goofier side. Be prepared to laugh, cry, roll your eyes, and shiver.” ~ M. H. Altis

Let’s get this out of the way. I found this book difficult to read. I know some of the words weren’t those intended. For instance, I don’t know what a “spurring boy of only five years old” would be. I even looked it up, to see if there was a definition of “spurring” that I wasn’t familiar with. I didn’t find one. There are some instances of the exact same wording used in a different part of a story to describe a condition or event. Some of the sentence structure was confusing – odd sentence structure or colloquialism. There are some places where it’s quite obvious some editing was done for a sentence and the unwanted remnants remained. A lot of what I found seemed to be simple word processing errors that a spellcheck wouldn’t catch.

5 AM Publishing needs a proofreader and an editor.

This is a book of short stories, so character development needs to be done quickly. The introduction of the group of friends in “Phantoms of Eternity: Haunted House” was interesting. Ages weren’t mentioned, or if they were I missed it. Initially they sounded like a bunch of high school kids, but then Sophia is described as having a visible scar from breast augmentation surgery. Oh! Must be early twenties? College kids? Nope. There’s mention of a new girl who was popular at her old high school. This made me go back and re-read Sophia’s description. Yup, high school girl with a boob job. Is that a thing now? Perhaps!

The boys all have a thing for the girls. No surprise there! What was a surprise was one couple, seconds after barely escaping one of the monsters in the house, moving in for a close, romantic moment while they’re still lying on the floor.

I could relate to “The Weeds.” I loved spending my summers in lakes, rivers and creeks but never any body of water that had vegetation in it! This one was definitely creepy!

“The Dog in the Woods” was an interesting story and more fleshed out, but it was also predicable. The ending wasn’t a surprise, though it was sad.

I had high expectations for “The Music Box.” The set up was great. But weird things happened with the telling of this one, too, not the least of which was using a rock to prevent a back door from closing as you couldn’t get back in – it locked automatically. But I couldn’t help wondering why they couldn’t just walk around the building to the front door, which was wide open. The visitors note a lot of inconsistencies in the condition of the place, which should be totally derelict, but is not. That’s never really explained. Also, it had really nothing to do with a music box, other than the fact it was there.

My favorite story was “The Shack.” Very creative use of an empty building and a surprise ending on this one!

All in all, I think the author did achieve the goal of making readers “laugh, cry, roll your eyes and shiver.”

3/5

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

My son *hates* these movies — so what better reason than that to read the books? I’m late to the party, I know, but that’s nothing new.

So, I read the book, then watched the movie. If you’ve only seen the movie — or just the commercials for the movies! — you’ve missed a lot. I can see now why my son thinks the movies are boring. They have to leave a lot of the details out, of course, to fit the films into two hours. But what I’d like to see is moving the story along — leave out all the “intense moments” where they’re just staring at each other — and actually tell the story more as the author wrote it.

I like the way the author writes. Sometimes, a book written in the first person just comes off as a “ME! ME! ME!” story, but it’s not like that. I like her sense of humor. I *love* the fact that it’s just pure, fun entertainment. You don’t need to highlight anything, or make notes in the margins. You can just go along for the ride.

I’d honestly like to see a stronger heroine and there are hints throughout that there’s something here that we just haven’t seen yet. I haven’t read the last book, “Breaking Dawn,” yet, and I really hope the big reveal is there.

3/5