Scan barcode
A review by booktrunks
After Sundown by
2.0
I want to start by saying thank you, Grady Hendrix, for being a reliable source of good scary stories in my life, and for making this book more bearable. You are one of the most consistent people in my life, and I never have to doubt that a piece of your writing will slap.
Now that I've said that, this anthology just absolutely did not work for me. It's about 280 pages long, and it has 20 STORIES. I sincerely don't understand why they would limit these authors like that, some of the stories were legitimately 4.5 pages long, and that's simply not enough room for a good story (Grady's was the longest as far as I know, so I feel like that is scientific evidence that the rest of the stories were far too short). I constantly felt like authors either had to cut out necessary info from the beginning of their story, leaving me confused, or they had to just stop the story abruptly, which left me super disappointed. I was actually starting to get angry in the middle of the collection because of how many stories left me unsatisfied, and I would have DNFd this if I wasn't waiting to get to Grady. I was so excited to pick this up and sample a bunch of new horror authors to try about since previously I have only read 3 or 4, but this didn't help me at all! On top of the stories being too short, a lot of these straight up were not scary, and I am so pathetically easily scared, so that's saying something.
I saw that the publisher had decided to try and do a yearly volume of these horror stories, so with that in mind I don't understand why they didn't cut the amount of authors in half and give them twice as much room to write, because I am almost 100% sure that would have made this better. But, after reading, I do not think I will be picking up the second volume. I honestly can't even recommend this, unfortunately. I'm sure these are all fantastic authors, but there was no room for them to show that.
Now that I've said that, this anthology just absolutely did not work for me. It's about 280 pages long, and it has 20 STORIES. I sincerely don't understand why they would limit these authors like that, some of the stories were legitimately 4.5 pages long, and that's simply not enough room for a good story (Grady's was the longest as far as I know, so I feel like that is scientific evidence that the rest of the stories were far too short). I constantly felt like authors either had to cut out necessary info from the beginning of their story, leaving me confused, or they had to just stop the story abruptly, which left me super disappointed. I was actually starting to get angry in the middle of the collection because of how many stories left me unsatisfied, and I would have DNFd this if I wasn't waiting to get to Grady. I was so excited to pick this up and sample a bunch of new horror authors to try about since previously I have only read 3 or 4, but this didn't help me at all! On top of the stories being too short, a lot of these straight up were not scary, and I am so pathetically easily scared, so that's saying something.
I saw that the publisher had decided to try and do a yearly volume of these horror stories, so with that in mind I don't understand why they didn't cut the amount of authors in half and give them twice as much room to write, because I am almost 100% sure that would have made this better. But, after reading, I do not think I will be picking up the second volume. I honestly can't even recommend this, unfortunately. I'm sure these are all fantastic authors, but there was no room for them to show that.