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dtaylorbooks's review against another edition
2.0
I wasn’t wowed by THE BACCHANAL. Most of the stories were trying just a little too hard to be scary and they came off just flat. The pacing on a lot of them was a bit too quick, many of them lurching into action far too quickly for the good of the greater plot. Most were not memorable.
In all fairness, it takes a lot to scare me and monsters pulled from drawings by toddlers and acting like a child’s nightmare won’t do it for me. That’s what these stores were: just a lot of overt LET ME SCARE YOU type of scenarios that had me shrugging more than anything else. Tension was left by the wayside for typical scares that, like I said, might scare a small child but just had me reading through the words in order to get to the end of the book. Thankfully it was short.
None of it was all that original and it just didn’t invoke any kind of fear. Maybe I read it on the wrong couple of days or I just wasn’t in the mood, but I wasn’t feeling it. I didn’t get any spine-tingling thrills, I’m not impressed by over the top monsters that are caricatures of themselves, or violence for the sake of violence that’s supposed to be in and of itself scary. I need something more cerebral. Something that really drills in and festers under the skin. None of these stories did that for me, unfortunately.
On top of that the editing appeared inconsistent depending on which story you read. I noticed that one or two had far more errors in them than others and it was really jarring. It made me wonder if the authors provided their own editing before the stories were pulled together. Even then there were errors that should have been caught in copyedits.
2
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
In all fairness, it takes a lot to scare me and monsters pulled from drawings by toddlers and acting like a child’s nightmare won’t do it for me. That’s what these stores were: just a lot of overt LET ME SCARE YOU type of scenarios that had me shrugging more than anything else. Tension was left by the wayside for typical scares that, like I said, might scare a small child but just had me reading through the words in order to get to the end of the book. Thankfully it was short.
None of it was all that original and it just didn’t invoke any kind of fear. Maybe I read it on the wrong couple of days or I just wasn’t in the mood, but I wasn’t feeling it. I didn’t get any spine-tingling thrills, I’m not impressed by over the top monsters that are caricatures of themselves, or violence for the sake of violence that’s supposed to be in and of itself scary. I need something more cerebral. Something that really drills in and festers under the skin. None of these stories did that for me, unfortunately.
On top of that the editing appeared inconsistent depending on which story you read. I noticed that one or two had far more errors in them than others and it was really jarring. It made me wonder if the authors provided their own editing before the stories were pulled together. Even then there were errors that should have been caught in copyedits.
2
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
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