Title: Brief, Horrible Moments: A collection of one sentence horror storiesAuthor: Marko Pandza
Series: Brief Horrible Moments #1
First Published: January 14, 2017
Publisher: Self-Published
Pages: 110
Genre: Horror, Short Stories
Format: Ebook
Source: Free Promotion
Rating:
Synopsis:
Chill your bones with two hundred and forty two horror stories, one sentence at a time.
Monsters, demons, creatures and oddities. Murder, death and the dead. Family, friends, love and relationships. Food and eating. Fear, dread, and the unknown. Crime and punishment. The human body.
Lock the doors, turn up the lights, and take a deep breath. A series of brief, horrible moments await.
Review
I couldn’t resist a unique idea when I stumbled on this little book, a collection of one-sentence horror stories that are meant to leave the reader wondering what happens next. I didn’t have very high expectations given the concept, but I figured it’d be an amusing short read and it was at first. Some of the earlier stories were not bad, and could easily work as a writing prompt. The vast majority unfortunately were utterly forgettable.
There were many connecting words, I can’t count the number of times I saw sentences broken up with the same words and phrases that gave it a repetitive quality. Despite grand leaps in setting many of the sentences felt the same. The stories rely heavily on a turning point within the scene which has the potential to be creepy, but oftentimes the narrative tone is sardonic. The narrators express that they weren’t very scared of whatever they were witnessing “until.” It made a good number of these sentences more funny than scary despite the grim themes.
The book is divided into themed chapters which were pointless, there were many stories that overlapped between multiple areas and it barely felt like there was a real rhyme or reason. The shorts continually got worse, lacking in creativity both in the ideas and with progressively worse writing, it made the book feel overlong and a complete drag to finish. While the book provided a few chuckles for my husband and me at some particularly wacky stories, I can’t say that I enjoyed myself overall.
Quote
“If you didn’t count the doll’s face and the fact that it was the size of a truck, it was a regular looking spider.”
Content Warnings
View Spoiler »About the Author
About Marko Pandza
Marko Pandza is an author, illustrator, musician and advertising copywriter/creative director from Toronto.
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