Booktubers – DaneCobain.com

Title: Local Haunts

Author: R. Saint Claire

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 298

Rating: 4/5

Disclaimer: While I aim to be unbiased, one of my short stories is featured in this collection.

Building on from the disclaimer, I suppose the first thing that I should mention is that my review is only valid for the other stories in the collection, because obviously I can’t exactly review a story that I wrote myself. Although for what it’s worth, I do think it’s one of the best short stories that I’ve ever written.

The stories here are all be different horror BookTubers, and the theme is that they’re stories from our own “local haunts”, i.e. places that are near to where we live. That means that there’s a huge amount of diversity here, and I think that Regina did a great job of corralling all of the authors together and successfully getting them to participate and meet deadlines.

I will say that I noticed the odd typo here and there, and I’m also not sure why some stories use single quotation marks and some use double, especially considering I originally used doubles and in the book it has singles. But they’re minor things and they don’t detract from the overall enjoyment, at least for me.

Overall, my favourite thing about picking up this book was the fact that I’m already pretty familiar with a bunch of the authors here and so I was looking forward to getting to them anyway. I enjoyed some stories more than others of course, but that’s always the case with short stories and so I’m not too surprised about that. I’d recommend giving it a go, and not just because my story is in there, especially if you’re into indie horror.

Learn more about Local Haunts.

Cassandra Clare – City of Bones | Review

Title: City of Bones

Author: Cassandra Clare

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 448

Rating: 5*/5

Cassandra Clare – City of Bones

Wow. So I suppose I had relatively low expectations for this one, and I’m not really sure why. I think part of it is the fact that everybody has been talking about it non-stop for the last few years and so I automatically assumed that because this series is popular, I wouldn’t like it. But the YA fans on YouTube – and the Netflix adaptation – both helped to convince me to give it a chance. That and the fact that I was able to get it on the cheap from a charity shop.

It turns out that this book is definitely worth the hype. I mean, I loved it, and now I want to read the rest of the series, and I’ll be prioritising it over some of the other series that I have on the go. The characters are three-dimensional and the story line is great, and while it does include a couple of cliches here and there, I kind of feel as though this is what started them off in the first place.

Of course, I have the benefit of having seen the Netflix series (which is good, I guess, but not as good as the book) and some of her interviews with popular booktubers which helps to give you a good idea of what she’s like as a person. This is the kind of series where more context is usually a good thing because there’s so much to the fictional world that you can almost never know it all. Plus it has its own unique political landscape which is well thought out and as absorbing as the stuff that George R. R. Martin writes in A Song of Ice and Fire.

Cassandra Clare

I’m not going to go into detail about the story line because there are potential spoilers and because most people already know about it. But it’s effectively about a teenage girl who discovers a whole hidden side to her life full of shadowhunters, vampires, werewolves and warlocks. It’s YA, but it’s thoughtful YA that reflects the multi-faceted world that we live in today. It’s very well done.

Overall, then, I regret coming to this book late, and I also regret letting my opinion be swayed by the simple fact that other people enjoyed it. It lived up to the hype, which books like this rarely do, and that alone makes it well worth reading. It’s not the right book for everyone of course, but if you’re already on the fence and debating it then definitely – jump right on in. You can thank me later.