Today we see that humor can make dark stories seem even darker.
What I gleaned about the stories: If someone secretly hates the gift you got them, them sharing it with you might not be a good thing.
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Note: This is a short story collection, so the rules are slightly different from standard Immerse or Die: instead of reading on every time I lose immersion, I stop reading that story and move on to the next one. As usual, I stop reading after the third WTF.
Analysis: The second sentence of the opening story is: It’s a death knell for some unfortunate creature, even if it isn’t always an immediate end, but it is always a bloody one. When I hit the second comma, my instinctive parsing was the end of a modifying sub-clause. While It’s a death knell for some unfortunate creature… but it is always a bloody one is a technically valid sentence, this broke my flow; a death knell is an audible warning so what would a blood-spattered sound look like?
A moment later, I realised that the third clause modified the second; the end was not always swift but it was always bloody. However, …even if it isn’t always an immediate end, but it is always a bloody one isn’t grammatically correct, so whatever trust that might provide in one area was lost in another.
My faith damaged before the end of the first paragraph, I moved on.
Analysis: One of the stories opens with a werewolf who is only a wolf while the light of the unobstructed full moon is on them, so clouds and shadows are causing them to shift back and forth to comic effect; however, the story is otherwise the usual visceral killing that characterises classic werewolf tale. This contrast both saves the story from becoming a single joke and makes the horror of tearing someone apart feel even more brutal by contrast.
Analysis: Several pages into a subsequent story, I hit: He smelled worse than mother superiors rude noises after bean soup. Because there was no apostrophe, I parsed mother superiors as a plural; thus the remainder of the sentence conflicted with my mental image requiring me to rebuild it.
Ironically, the mixing of humour and seriousness that I had noted earlier contributed to this catching me so off guard; while smelling like several mother superiors is not normally a description someone would use, a joke that the mother superior smelt a little odd so several of her would smell worse works quite well as banter between people who know each other.
Momentum stalled, I moved on.
Analysis: While the stories do share an authorial voice, so have a certain consistency in type of horror, the stories and characters display sufficient range that I didn’t begin to feel I was reading the same story repeatedly with only the details tweaked.
Take the Pepsi Challenge: Want to know if my own writing measures up? Download one of these free short stories, in the format of your choice, and decide for yourself.
