Several weaknesses that are often seen in the work of writers still learning their craft recurred in the majority of the stories in this anthology. The first, and most common, was the tendency to “over-write” and use stilted language, big words, and complex sentence constructions where more simple and direct language would be much more effective. The second is the lack of specificity, glossing over details that would make the story come alive. Finally, in several stories, the authors used a lot of dialogue tags besides “said”, a classic beginner problem.

That said, two stories that stood out were “The Sliding” by Kevin Lucia and “Apartment J” by Gabrielle Faust. In “The Sliding”, a boyhood experience comes back to haunt a man. I liked the Lovecraftian overtones to the story, namely the idea of a curious explorer (the boys) discovering a powerful evil better left alone.

In “Apartment J”, a young woman confronts her neighbor about strange noises coming from the neighbor’s apartment and finds more than she bargained for. I think that bad things happening to decent people is much scarier than bad things happening to bad people, and this story delivers in that regard.

The two stories disappointed me the most (because they failed to capitalize on interesting and original ideas) were “Mr. Fucking Bothersome” by Dave Rex and “Flower in the Wind” by Rick McQuiston. The opening sentence of “Mr. Fucking Bothersome” proposes, “Imagine…our world without religion.” However, instead of taking a hard look at this, and perhaps exploring some of the two thousand years of philosophical thought regarding ethics and morals, the story takes the easy and predictable route. In the world of the story, people have no morals and do anything they please.

In “Flower in the Wind”, the world is suddenly afflicted with hurricane-force winds, forcing the four characters in the story to take refuge in a cave. I liked the twist at the end, but the typos and the general writing problems I mentioned above dragged the story down.

The worst two stories were “Damnation Observes” by Nickolaus Pacione and “The Red Cloud Affliction” by Stanley Anderson. In “The Red Cloud Affliction”, a student finds his teacher dead in his classroom, and in fulfilling his teacher’s final request, the student starts a deadly chain reaction. The problem is that the story has no context; it occurs in a vacuum of details such as the time period, location, age of students, etc. It was also difficult to follow the action, and POV jumped in the latter part of the story.

I still haven’t figured out what the appallingly bad “Damnation Observes” is about. The writing is so rambling, ungrammatical, filled with illogical sentences, and repetitive that it gave me a headache. The problems included incomplete sentences (and not the kind authors do on purpose to emphasize a point), subject/verb disagreement, misused words, comma splices, etc. This story is a shining example of how not to write, and I am puzzled as to why it was even included in this anthology. It is clearly bad, bad writing.

I might have been given a pdf copy of the book because I am a contributor, but I decided to break down and spend the $13.49 for the print copy so I can take the print copy with me to a few promoters to see if they would want to bring a few of the authors in and sign copies of the book. Bobe knows exactly what he's doing with this book and he's giving authors who are just getting started or just establishing a chance that some bigger places don't have the balls to published.


Some pretty pretty damn good stories in here, The Sliding by Kevin Lucia is pretty damn good and I own Coach's Midnight Diner where I was first introduced to his work. His story here has a delivery that you can't really pinpoint the influence but you know it is own voice. The story I read non-stop at GOthicfest is Kevin Lucia.


The other author I was honored in working with on Tabloid Purposes IV, Ethereal Gazette Issue 5 and Issue 3, then again on Tabloid Purposes 3 and on issue six. That author is a hell of an illustrator too, if you want to know who I am talking about here I am the guy who discovered him -- Alex Rivera. Plenty of good authors to choose from, and that is the tip of the iceburg. If you can get past those stories and handle the frights from one cover to the last, then you will see mine.


I won't say much about it right now but if you want to do an interivew about me for it I can give you the full back story, it is based on a lady I knew from high school and dragged me to a church service with her. I will say that much right now but I am not going to go much further than that. The story is rooted in that and I will say this much -- it is a bizarro tale of Gothic Horror. No small animals were harmed in the process of writing the story.
One story that I am tempted to expand right now and the dark fantasy "author" above there hates with a passion, I am going to expand THE FANDOM WRITER for its print debut. Mark my words those who posting passages of my story up there, this expanded version is going to make the original versions look like child's play.


It's going to be called FANDOM '08. All that I've written with An Eye In Shadows will go into every agression that The Fandom Writer '04 was. Fandom Writer 'O8 will be be Unleashed and it will be one nasty little story of horror fiction. Janrae Frank might live to hate my guts but The Fandom Writer is the story she hates with a passion and the reason she bought the pdf copy is to tell me to pretty much burn in hell.


I am giving her a better reason to hate my guts than to see this story get published.


It pisses her to hell that I got published with House of Spiders 3, and I am getting more momentum as time goes on. I guess she can't review an anthology that isn't available as an e-book either (referring to Tabloid Purposes IV.) Welcome to cyberhell, and this is the rewrite that is getting the science fiction retooling. She hasn't been print published in a long time and I am starting to get some clout now with the reviews and interviews I am doing.I won't comment on my story here because that isn't my place to comment on the story but I will every author in here has a killer delivery with their work and they know what they're doing. I guess someone like Ms. Frank is stuck up and snobbish to appreciate an anthology of this kind of magnitude because each author in here might had eventually found their way to some of my more extreme publications such as QUAKES AND STORMS and I plan a QUAKES AND STORMS 2. I guess the way her mentality is right now is that she's just mad that some of my stories are seeing print publications now or days.
She hates everything I do no matter how much I am getting the critical acclaim and she's pissed off that I am seeing the sales here and there, she has a habit of harassing every publisher who worked with me so I became my own publisher. I wondered what happened to that anthology she was doing, might have folded....

I paid for the privilege of posting this review. I bought the download. So I guess Nicky gets some of my money. But so do the other authors out there who write better than he does.



I cannot believe that you took all those reviews down. I know for a fact that more than one of them were legitimate, just as this one is.



"Madness is as it becomes a hell no one understands or wants to begin to see. The witness of such becomes in the realms of the mentally ill, and as myself, this was a darker place some try to fathom or put an explanation on."



You really want to tell me that that is decent writing?



No editor worth their salt will publish Pacione. The quality of this anthology is driven down by his presence in it. It is grammatically challenged, plotless, and totally lacking in characterization.



The small press and self-publishing has earned itself another black eye with this one and it is well-deserved. Writing like this is what keeps it in the ghetto. No, not the ghetto. It's in the sewers.



And if you delete this one, I will post it across the net widely, and you'll get all the PR you desire. Except it will be the kind that you don't want. What kind is that?



Honesty.



Can you really handle honesty?