Midnight Graffiti

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She opens the anthology with an eight-page introduction, smugly explaining to her readers every obvious, bromidic reason that people are fascinated by horror.

I especially love horror in short story form, so I was delighted to find a new collection - and thrilled to find it so gratifying. After that, the remainder is really bad: very short tales “Cattletruck” by Cliff Burns and “Salvation” by Lawrence Person are both rather pointless and lame while striving to be meaningful and thought-provoking, and Joe Lansdale’s attempt at comedy with “Bob the Dinosaur Goes to Disneyland” falls flat.The final story, "Dark Embrace," comes from (mercifully silent) co-editor James Van Hise and is an adroit, if somewhat predictable, story of a boy who is forced to mature with cruel haste. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Horror is the only medium that regularly succeeds in relating the momunmental strangness of the world in an accessible, cathartic manner. And then… there were the other stories… which delved into insane issues, off-kilter writing styles, violent twisted viewpoints, and drugged deranged plots that made me feel uncomfortable… which, even though they were not my cup of tea, I still highly admired because I love reading and seeing things from different perspectives than my own. Stephen King's "Rainy Season" is passable, but classic King filler; Neil Gaiman impresses as always - perhaps more so alongside some of the less experienced authors included in this collection.

It specialized in all kinds of horror and weird fantasy fiction from authors both new and established. That said, I think it is important to bear in mind that some people can find stories that are designed to be pleasant, unpleasant. I can think of positively no reason for any collection to have twenty-four introductions written by one person. It did have a great line, jauntily poking fun at military/old man lingo: Goldilocks was SAC - Strategic Air Command - headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska; ETA was Estimated Time of Arrival. Among those I found to be particularly unreadable: "The Domino Man," "Salvation," and most of all, "Rant" by Nancy A.I want to get married says the world's smallest man: I can't explain why I liked this story, as it was pretty strange. After graduating with a Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, he became a teacher. I hunkered down in the uncomfortable confines of the stairwell in my usual train-car to distance myself from the bustling cretins of the world and whipped the relic known as ‘Midnight Graffiti’ out.