This book’s title comes from the reality that – like a moth to the flame – we’re all just one event, mishap, or decision away from things that could change our lives forever. What would you do if fate led you astray into a grim world where you encountered vengeful ghosts, homicidal maniacs, ancient gods, apocalyptic nightmares, dark magic, deadly space aliens, and more?If you dare, why not find out? Read for yourself the twenty-two gloriously provocative tales that dwell within this book – but be warned, some of my dear readers have experienced lasting nightmares…
Dark bleating my wonderful tribe! I hope you’ve all been having a most excellent week. I’m talking about a short story collection today. Right away I should tell you that this was a bit of a weird one for me because the further into the book I went, the deeper my love/hate relationship with it grew.
Let me get my criticisms out of the way first because I absolutely hate having to air criticisms, but in the name of a fair and honest review, alas…. I must. Just imagine that I dramatically collapsed to the floor with the book pressed to my chest as I uttered that last sentence.
I’d say the love/hate ratio was about 50/50 here, which hardly ever happens. I either tend to mostly love a short story collection, or the writer’s style just isn’t for me and I mostly hate it. This hybrid of a collection somehow struck a balance right down the middle where I – and I can’t tell you how much I don’t want to say this – really hated half the stories. But I absolutely loved the other half! The conclusion I’ve drawn is that I generally enjoy the author’s writing style, but apparently there are some story topics I hate enough that even good writing can’t save them for me.
I have a pretty strong aversion, typically, to stories about mental health, or set in mental health facilities. For those of you familiar with my reviews, this might sound an odd statement to you if you saw how much I raved about Gemma Amor’s Full Immersion, but that was a really rare, spectacular exception. Mostly, the mere mention of a psychiatric hospital will make me slam a book shut, and unfortunately for me and my weird, picky tastes, several of the stories in this collection revolved around such things.
However, as I said, for every story that rubbed me up the wrong way, there was one that made me live deliciously. My three favourites are:
THE NEW LAW
A woman is sentenced to the death penalty despite a prior agreement, and just when you think there’s a silver lining, it’s manically scratched away. Pretty chilling!
CONTROL
This was sooooo weird, but my favourite type of weird. A woman who is extremely down on her luck in every way that one can be in life, picks the wrong victim one night. What goes down is so horrific that not even the karmic theme could soothe me!
OVER AND OUT
My top favourite! A pilot runs into a bizarre fog mid-flight and there are things in it. Things worsen as she rushes to land, but will solid ground save her from the terrors in the air? It sort of reminded me in tone of The Langoliers, and in concept, of The Mist, and a Stephen King comparison is always a compliment.
Though I didn’t love every story in this collection, I would definitely read more work from Jeff Parsons! I’d recommend this book to horror fans who enjoy a mixture of odd, surreal, and real-world horror concepts. If you’d like to check out the book, the link is below for you:
Happy Goat Horror 
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