This is a powerful collection of stories from Briana Morgan. The title story, The Tricker-Treater, holds a place in my heart as one of my favorites in the collection, from its well-spoken monster to the very idea of terror it breeds, it sets the tone for the rest of the collection, snapshots of horror brought to life. I don’t want to go through each story individually, but as with any collection, some of them hit harder than others.
This book is less about monsters and more about the monsters that lurk within ourselves. There are, of course, monsters and ghosts. Along with The Tricker-Treater, one of my favorite stories is Charity, which breathes new life—figuratively speaking, of course—into the classic ‘ghost story’ trope. A wonderful slow-burn ghost story.
One or two stories feel like they were missing key information. Reading through, I failed to have that ‘a-ha’ moment where everything fell into place and instead left me feeling a little disappointed, flipping back through previous pages to see if there was information I’d missed, a clue anywhere, or whether the snapshot of the characters’ lives we received was simply too small to piece together a truly horrifying story.
I do love that this collection contains multiple types of horror. Some is visceral horror, then there are ghost stories and slow burns, a few pieces of flash fiction, as well as our classic monster stories mixed with some emotional horror. There’s a story in here that’s ‘for’ any type of horror reader.
As a final note, this cover is absolutely gorgeous and I spent more time than I want to admit gushing about my love for it to my boyfriend, who acknowledged it was a nice cover and then proceeded to not care. The beautiful cover certainly set the tone of the writing and the stories within and really helped get me excited to dive in.
Fallen Fiction Reviews 