Sunday, July 29, 2012

Blood Lite III: Aftertaste anthology


Title: Blood Lite III: Aftertaste
Author: Anthology edited by Kevin J. Anderson
Genre: Horror/Paranormal Fantasy
Publisher: Pocket Books (May 29, 2012)
Available: $7.99 at Amazon
Rating: 3 stars
Rater: Lauri

From the publisher:
Sink your teeth into a smorgasbord of macabre morsels laced with horrific humor in this all-new Blood Lite collection! Whether you shriek with laughter or scream in fear . . . well, that’s simply a matter of taste.

What I liked: I adore horror, and bought this book to read as I traversed the skies during my recent travels. And some of the stories are better than great. Jim Butcher’s, for one. And I love the “smorgasbord,” as the pub calls it, approach to reading. It’s a blast, and you get to dip your tongue into so many different flavors – plots, characters, storylines, descriptions. And short stories are a better choice if you’re attention is wandering, or if, like me, you have a child to watch, too.

What I didn’t like: Some of the stories were horrifying, and not in a good way. That they didn’t contain spelling errors is perhaps the best thing I can say about them. The plots of those several were beyond trite, or so shallow I could see right through them. Melodramatic dialogue. All telling and no showing. Too much explained and not enough revealed. These stories seemed to be written by brand-new writers who had no editors to bleed the stories into some semblance of good.

In sum: Unless the price is lowered an awful lot, I absolutely will not buy another one of these books. Even the half of the stories I liked cannot make up for the half that I didn’t.

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