This book is a collection of 14 short horror stories by newcomer Steven Deighan.

The stories here cover quite a few different themes. You have bad parents like in “Father and Son” which has no supernatural elements which makes it all the more evil for its normality. Monsters like in “Ungodly Cause” which is just one more reason to look inside for happiness rather than in a surgical blade. There are also demons, spirits, and worst of all, evil teenagers.

I’m not a huge fan of short stories. I generally don’t learn enough about the characters in such a short amount of time to really care for their fate.

Someone who really enjoys short stories would probably rate this collection higher than me. With that said there are a couple of people whose fate is so bleak that I did wind up caring about them only because you don’t want things that horrible happening to anyone, no matter who they are.

Some of his stories are almost like scenes clipped out of movies. There’s no regular beginning, middle, end, just smaller scenes of a big picture that’s lurking about offstage. Sometimes this was annoying as I didn’t really get what was going on but other times I thought it added to the story to have to wonder the reasons why.

The best story in the book is “Feels Like Stephen King.” I wanted to not like it thinking the title was too gimmicky but Mr. King is mentioned only once, when a struggling writer finally sells a novel. The story itself has an “In the Mouth of Madness” feel to it. It’s the most fleshed out of the bunch (pun intended!)

I think this writer has a lot of potential and will improve with age. Mr. Deighan is only 22 and while there isn’t anything wrong with that, he has a lot of years ahead of him for life to have the opportunity to smack him upside the head which can only improve a horror writer.