Another New Review

This review from author Tara Fox Hall has left me with mixed feelings. While she did give her honest opinion- which I think is great- I was a bit taken aback by the critique of a passage from one of my stories, "The Dark Mind". Am I wrong to think this a bit supercilious of another author?  ;-)

I'm not sure what to make of it, but I thank Ms. Hall for reading and taking time to write a review. You can find more information about Ms. Hall and her books on  by clicking here.

The Review:

Tara's Thoughts:

Usually for an anthology, I list the name and my thoughts. But with this amount of stories, I’ll just list the ones I liked best.

Finder’s Weepers was excellent! I loved the zing at the end. It was the perfect start to this kind of anthology, a story that kept you guessing, wondering what was going to happen, and when it ended, I wanted badly to read onto the next story right away.

Murder of the Future was very strange, but I enjoyed the story. It was of particular interest as my husband made AI a large part of his professional career.

Yesterday’s Children was unbelievable to me, but yet moving nonetheless.

I was also moved by Reflections of the Past.

If She Whispers had been shorter, I’d really think it would have been at home with any of the horror flash fiction websites on the Internet. A very interesting premise and I was sorry when the story ended, because I wanted to know what was going to happen next.

Laugh like a Baby was also too odd for me.

I liked the premise of the Roads not Travelled very much, and wish it would have been longer. Existence also was very entertaining!

In summation, I have to say I was hoping for more in this anthology. It never grabbed me, even though I liked the stories, and the ideas behind each one were very imaginative. Here is an example:

My feet pounded under me as I ran through the darkness. There was something in the black void behind me, chasing me. What it was I didn’t know, and part of me did not wish to find out. I was running through unfamiliar surroundings, in quintessence I

was running from the strange, into the mysterious.

Reading this, I am not scared at all. It seems like the words a child would use to recant a nightmare they had, except that the last sentence in the paragraph sounds more like a lit major’s try for creative writing in a college class. I feel distant from the action, even though I can clearly get a picture of what is happening. Some of that is the medium, in that it’s very hard to infuse a lot of emotion in a short story, and most of these stories are only a few pages long. But I was very wowed by the sheer imagination that this author has to think up such bizarre and entertaining stories. This is the most imaginative collection I have ever read.

 Happy Reading!