To close off my little series of posts on Halloween, I'm going to end it with two things. The first is a review, and the second is a small reveal.
Check it out Here!
Darkest of Dreams is a short story collection cobbled together by four different writers of Horror tales that span across the spectrum.
As I've said, I don't read much Horror. It's not so much due to lack of interest in the genre, but for why I read scarier stories. Most Horror I've come across doesn't go for what I'm interested in. There's the border between life and death, eternity and the unknown, horrors that want the soul more than blood, and the terror of inevitable decay of the world to sin. It's that relationship between the natural and the supernatural that fascinates this reader. Duality and clashing sensibilities make for great stories, but they make for great Horror tales as well. That is why H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith's tales resonate so much with readers even so many years later.
This collection, containing four writers with different ideas of Horror helps scratch that itch. Christopher Warren's stories are more psychological, Conner Goff writes yarns about those slowly awakening to the strangeness around them, Nathan Dabney's tales are somewhere between Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft, and William Harmar's entries are like short character pieces divorced from a larger narrative. Each writer has something different to add, making this collection well worth reading for general Horror fans.
There are similar approaches between some of the stories, but each brings out the character of the author enough that none run close to the other. Personally, I enjoyed Nathan Dabney's stories the most as they were action horror tales, and one of which includes a mysterious rough traveler with a heart of gold: the sort of story I never get tired of.
My least favorite is easily the final story that feels interminable and takes far too long to get to the point. But that is the only story I just could not get into.
If you're a Horror fan, or just looking for some eerie reads, this is the collection for you. Be sure to give it a chance.
In other news, I promised.I was working on a non-writing project for awhile now, and I have been. I wanted to reveal it sooner, but couldn't find the right opportunity.
So it'll be now.
I've been working on a podcast with a friend of mine called Cannon Cruisers. It's a series where we spend 10-15 minutes each week talking about a movie from the Cannon Films catalog. We're more or less going chronological from 1980's Schizoid up until Cannon finally closed its doors in the early 90s.
We're doing this for several reasons. The first is that neither one of us has seen as much 80s films as we would have liked. I also wanted to chart the change in 1980s pop culture, and no film company best illustrates how things changed so much than Cannon Films did. Mostly we just wanted to do a fun little project we could do on the side.
Modern films are also not very good. I've only seen a grand total of two movies in cinema this year, and only one of which I later bought on DVD. This gives me an excuse to watch something that can hold my attention and fire up the imagination. And maybe it'll do the same for you, too.
We're currently on episode 8, and have just completed our super-long and unedited Halloween special. If that is too much, just check out one of the shorter episodes instead. We release one episode a week, usually on Sundays, on soundcloud and our blog, and later on vid.me when one of us has some extra time. Please check us out if that's your sort of thing.
And that's it for my series of Halloween related posts. I hope you had fun. Until next year, keep it spooky.
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