by Alex Mcdermott:
Short story collections scare me a little. An anthology, with a multitude of authors, is sure to contain something that catches your attention. But staring down the pages of a single author and a whole bunch of stories can be a little…well… scary. A novel has time on its side. Pages and pages draw you in or shove you out of the narrative. Characters build, grow, and change. Short stories are fast, furious, and immediate…a different animal. Can an author pull off a whole collection?
Looking at the cover of Kenneth Cain’s collection These Old Tales: Volume One, I figure so far so good. There are no eyeballs hanging out or guts spilled down the front of a zombie. I started reading and couldn’t stop with this one. Cain’s skill as a writer is his ability to take mundane things most of us would never notice and turn them into true terror. Monstrous metal traps snapping the life from someone… but wait… all is not what it seems. That phrase sums up Cain’s collection! I thought I had the story all figured out, only to gasp in surprise at the end. All is definitely not what it seems! Rather than shock and revulsion through gore and violence, Cain scares us. He returns to the roots of Gothic horror with suspense, tension, and that wicked twist in the end. You will never look at a drainpipe the same again. In fact, you might want to sleep with the lights on.
These Old Tales: Volume One can be found on Amazon.com and Smashwords.
Comments are closed.