Oh, the horror

Since I occasionally tend to lazily put things off, I’ve been sitting for months on a pile of to-be-written book reviews that just kept growing to the point where it really started to look like work. That made me feel so guilty, I decided to give a few of the authors on that pile a bit of a shout-out here on my blog, to atone for my neglective behavior.

Let’s start with Pat Black. At one point in the past, I stumbled upon one of his collections of short stories and greatly enjoyed reading them. Let’s face it, short stories are an art of their own, like a minimalist painting – not every painter can capture the moment with just a few strokes of the brush, and not every writer can draw a reader into their world with just a few lines. Pat Black is one of those who can, which is also why I invited him to contribute to the last Cake & Quill anthology, Paws and Claws. Luckily, he said yes.

But as good a short story writer as he is, there’s one thing Pat Black is even better at, which brings us back to the title of this post. Oh, the horror.

Last atumn I got myself this little novella, innocuously titled ‘Sleepover‘. Oh boy. Do not, repeat, NOT read home alone in the dark. This is a seriously masterfully scary tale. I made the mistake of reading it in bed before going to sleep, which promptly resulted in the most horrid nightmare and, when I woke up in the middle of the night, me being too scared to even go to the bathroom. There simply didn’t seem to be a safe place outside my blanket, and I wasn’t even home alone. I had the husband there, both kids and the dog, but I nevertheless felt like a child driven to almost wetting my pants based on a work of complete fiction.

Stupid, eh? Ha. You just go and read it yourself. Sleep well. If you can.