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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.

Oli Jacobs – Strange Days in High Wycombe | Review

Title: Strange Days in High Wycombe

Author: Oli Jacobs

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 260

Rating: 8/10

Oli Jacobs – Strange Days in High Wycombe

Oli Jacobs is a local author and this is a local novel, so if you’ve ever been to High Wycombe then you’re going to enjoy this even more than you will if you’re a newcomer to the area. Either way, you’re in good hands – you’ll get to meet Guy and Kriste, the latter of which will be your guide throughout this strange land of alcoholic beverages.

Now, there were some errors here, but in many ways, that’s to be expected from an indie author – my main issues were with misused apostrophes, although there was the odd typo here and there and I also thought that the layout looked a little strange because there were spaces between each paragraph.

Usually, that’s enough for me to stop reading something, or to give it a bad review; in this case, though, I was able to get over that, because of how gripping the story line was. The author also uses an interesting, grandiose style here – it’s over the top, but it’s deliberately over the top, because that reflects Guy, the novel’s unreliable narrator. In many ways, he’s like Holden Caulfield, and while it takes a while to get used to him, it’s worth it in the end.

Overall then, a good read and a lot of fun, and while it would benefit from a little polishing and editing, it’s still a pretty good effort on its own. Cheers!