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A review by xan_van_rooyen
The Macabre Masterpiece: Poems of Horror and Gore by Justin Bienvenue
3.0
I love poetry, the darker the better. Two of my all time favourite writers are phenomenal poets: Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire. So it was with certain expectations that I began reading this anthology.
What I Liked: The structure and divisions. The chapter breaks work well to group the ideas within the poems and also afford the reader a sometimes much needed break between all the gruesomeness. The poems certainly are quite brutal, telling individual tales while contributing to the recurrent theme of death and horror.
What I Didn’t Like: I’m not the biggest fan of rhyming poetry. I found some of the rhyming lines overly contrived to the point where the rhyme became more important than the imagery or story being told. Sometimes this undermined the impact of the poem.
My Rating: This collection is certainly about blood, death and gore: definitive horror. I would’ve preferred more subtle and less explicit writing. There are a few gems in this collection though and those alone make this worth the read. 3/5 stars.
What I Liked: The structure and divisions. The chapter breaks work well to group the ideas within the poems and also afford the reader a sometimes much needed break between all the gruesomeness. The poems certainly are quite brutal, telling individual tales while contributing to the recurrent theme of death and horror.
What I Didn’t Like: I’m not the biggest fan of rhyming poetry. I found some of the rhyming lines overly contrived to the point where the rhyme became more important than the imagery or story being told. Sometimes this undermined the impact of the poem.
My Rating: This collection is certainly about blood, death and gore: definitive horror. I would’ve preferred more subtle and less explicit writing. There are a few gems in this collection though and those alone make this worth the read. 3/5 stars.