Goose bumps and horror pleasures: experience for the second time horror stories, subtle splatter and dark fantasies from dark feathers. A research team strays from the path. A man goes to his class reunion, but he doesn’t look for old friends there. A friendly married couple no longer wants to put up with the harassment of their sadistic neighbor. They all have no idea of the cruel consequences. The bestselling authors Markus Heitz and Kai Meyer, Thomas Finn, Boris Koch and many others open the doors of reality and unleash in their horror stories the unimagined horrors lurking in the darkness. A fascinating, abysmal reading pleasure for all those who prefer raven black to fairy pink. Also fascinating is a visit at the Poker en ligne Suisse! The stories are accompanied by the cover pictures, which were individually designed by the authors themselves.
My opinion
I definitely don’t read enough horror stories at the moment, which is why this collection of short stories made me curious, in order to make the genre a bit more appealing to me. Read more about this topic here: https://literaturkritik.de/public/neue_buecher.php?f_tage=60
In the book you can expect 16 stories from different authors, the shortest of which is only one page long, a small teaser at the beginning to get you in the mood for the coming horror.
I have to admit, though, that I wasn’t really scared by any of the stories. They all have something special and especially the different ideas are really great and make a diversified collection, where everybody gets his money’s worth; but I missed the real “horror”.
But the stories are very diverse. For example, “The Grudge” is about an ancient superstition, which one should enjoy with caution. “Der flüssige Bob” leads us to an expedition whose paths lead to nightmarish paths and “The Witch and the Torturer” was to be enjoyed with humour. An amusing idea is also hidden behind “Master Calamitas’ amazing curiosities”, but “The Other Me” is a bit more brutal. The “Elephants’ Graveyard” is a rather macabre game with death, just like “Peter”, which leads us to loneliness in our society – this story was my personal highlight.
Sonja Rüthers has put together a good mixture here, but as it is the case with anthologies, not all stories appealed to me equally. Be it through the idea or the implementation, but there were also impressive stories that carried me away with their atmosphere and surprises.
I very seldom read short stories, and perhaps that’s why it wasn’t so easy for me to get involved with these snapshots. Even though the horror element underlies every story, I missed a little bit of the goosebump feeling.
Conclusion
I don’t really know where to start. I had rather expected a black-humorous comedy, which it partly is, whereas I didn’t know whether I should actually laugh or cry.
The story is told from three different perspectives:
❇ Marnie is 15 and thinks about herself (quote on page 12) “Too young to smoke, too young to drink and too young to fuck, but who can stop me?
She’s very direct in her thoughts, which she uses to communicate with the reader, even if she doesn’t know it herself. She barricades everything behind high walls, represses what is possible to make her life even a little bit bearable.
❇ Nelly is 12 and her younger sister. But while Marnie constantly anaesthetizes herself and inflicts mental pain in order to forget other pains, Nelly takes refuge in a completely different world. She talks like an adult, plays the violin like a virtuoso, and bends reality to fit in as well as she can.
Both are clever, shrewd and true survivors, because the life their parents offered them has given them nothing. Alcohol, drugs, sexual debauchery and neglect sound so easy to write down but when you read how Marnie tells in her mocking, bitter irony what happened and how she deals with it, it hits you right in the heart.
❇ It also hits Lennie, her neighbour, in the heart. An older man whose loneliness is only broken by his dog Bobby. When he discovers that the two girls suddenly find themselves completely alone, his protective instinct is awakened – and the need that everyone carries in us: to be needed.
You really have to pay attention to the subtleties and read between the lines, because even if Marnie sees many things quite casually and apparently without conscience, you can probably notice how everything becomes too much for her and how she longs to have people around her who take care of her, give her security and love. To whom it is important what she does.
Even Nelly, with whom it is even harder to look behind the scenes, is completely overwhelmed and clings to the only support that has saved her from a crash in her life so far: her big sister.
Lennie on the other hand feels guilty. Not everything went well in his life either, but in his heart he is a good person and a blessing for the two girls.
I could hardly put the book down! One catastrophe follows the next, I was shocked, dismayed, hopeful and touched, while these three people try everything to get a grip on life.
The chapters are very short and alternate constantly between the characters – a very good structure, because you could often experience the situations from different points of view. It is about guilt, shame, responsibility and reparation, about the feeling of being needed, seen, accepted, loved. Without suffocating the other person, but leaving him the air to breathe, to live. This is what every human being longs for deep inside.
For me, the core of this was also the great responsibility that parents bear, and why some cannot do this. Of course the question of guilt arises here, but the author has shown very well that this is often too easy. After all, parents also had parents under whom they grew up, and they too had parents who put their stamp on them. It is very difficult to draw a line here and although I see the parents as guilty (who really did everything wrong right down to the last detail), they also had little chance to do things differently, to do them better, because of their history.
One can only hope that somebody will break this cycle, that children, teenagers and also adults will meet people who can help them and let them find a way that promises hope for something better. And no, that is not easy and not everyone can do it.
But also the prejudices are discussed, especially towards young people, because even if you often think how bad and sloppy and aggressive and disrespectful they act, behind each of these people there is a past we don’t know, there is a life they have to live with and you can’t allow yourself to judge before you know what made them who they are now. The author has a very disarming way of telling the situations in a funny, profound and thought-provoking way that impressed me very much.
Children are very adaptable and love their parents, no matter what they do or don’t do, but they pay for it with emotional damage that can rarely be healed. They live, of course, the question is how.
Scars like these can be felt for a lifetime.
Review of The Fairy Forest by Steve Augarde
Celandine is the girl with whom it all began that mysterious figure from the past who once brought the Little People to Mill Farm. The second part of Steve Augarde’s wonderful elf novel is actually the first, but the order doesn’t matter, everything is so artfully interwoven! Celandine and Midge from the first volume, two heroines from different times, meet each other in their stories as if they lived in parallel worlds and this permeability, a “flicker” of time, gives both novels an additional, fascinating dimension. Also fascinating is the Bitcoin live Casino.
A Murderlust by Franzi Wolf
Dangerous. Very erotic. Hilarious. Bavarian!
A mayor also known as “Hooker Mane”. A greedy contractor. A wild blood sister quartet. African refugees. A priest with a double life. And the old heathen who shows up whenever it’s not convenient.
A cruel murder reshuffles the cards of the protagonists – and in the midst of the supposed idyll of the Bavarian Forest, human abysses open up.
Franzi Wolf, the newcomer to the Bavarian literary scene, carries the readers away: into a perfidious and tingling microcosm somewhere in the Bavarian nowhere! Read more about books here: https://www.weltbild.de/buecher/neuheiten