Timothy J. Jarvis

I read this excellent volume of weird tales with the Literary Horror Group over at Goodreads during the month of April.

What I liked: I enjoyed the premise-which is basically a collection of short stories connected by a manuscript. Towards the end of the book the creation of the manuscript becomes the main story, but I liked the individual stories the best. These were not flat out horror stories, but they WERE horrific at times. They were more like tales of the weird and they put me in mind of Robert Aickman; these were a little more straight forward than Aickman's, but they were definitely weird.

What I didn't like : At times it felt to me that the author was trying too hard to seem....literary? Is that the word I'm looking for? There was a portion of the tale where all these nods were given to authors of the past, but said nods were given with only descriptions of the authors and not their names. For whatever reason this irked me. Is it because I didn't know who most of them were? I'm SURE that's part of it. But it also came off to me as a bit superior. (I know who these authors are, and what their behaviors were like and you don't. Cue the HA HA from Nelson Muntz on The Simpsons.)

Overall though, I thought this book was impressive, especially for a first time effort. I will be looking for more from this author in the future, because I did enjoy his imaginative telling of this super weird tale.

Highly recommended!… (more)