Review: Quarter to Midnight: Fifteen Tales of Horror and Suspense by Darcy Coates

Print Length: 312 pages

Publisher: Black Owl Books (May 01, 2015)

From Goodreads.com: Fifteen chilling tales of gothic horror and suspense.

Push past the curtains of the rational, safe world and explore the un-nameable horrors living in the darkest corners of our conscience. This is the realm of monsters and shifting shadows, where a single wrong step can plunge you into a terrifying, irreversible fight for your life.

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My Rating: 2 stars out of 5

I love all things horror. Stories. Movies. Haunted Houses. Urban Legends. All of it. In fact my first foray into the world of horror was Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark when I was six. 

Sadly, that is what this collection of short stories felt like. None of them were particularly scary (in fact I read most of them home alone, in the dark and went to sleep shortly thereafter). A couple of them stood out as being enjoyable (or maybe more accurately memorable), while most of the others were either just okay,  or insanely boring. This would be perhaps in part to the fact that these are incredibly short, so we often don't get any rhyme or reason to why certain things happen. They just do. Or perhaps it is the way some of these ended in extremely predictable ways. By far my favorites of the bunch were Whose Woods are These, Mannering House, and Lucy. Those are ones I can hear being told around campfires as part of a "small town urban legend". 

Now, I've read one of the this author's longer stories and I know what she is capable of as far as world building and bringing tension to her stories. And while there were glimpses of that talent in these, in my opinion, they were just too short to make a good impression (unless perhaps you are easily unnerved). And because I've seen what she is capable of, I will continue reading more from this author.

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                                                    Quarter to Midnight is available from Amazon.com

                                   (for free if your subscribe to Kindle Unlimited)