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Shadow Moths: Frightful Horrors Quick Reads
Frightful Horrors QUICK READS are short, affordable ebooks which aim to introduce the reader to both contemporary and classic authors who may be new to them. In Shadow Moths, we present two brand new stories from award-nominated genre author, Cate Gardner.
We Make Our Own Monsters Here is a bizarre and creepy tale of puppets with minds of their own, while Blood-Moth Kiss provides a poignant love story set in apocalyptic times.
We Make Our Own Monsters Here is a bizarre and creepy tale of puppets with minds of their own, while Blood-Moth Kiss provides a poignant love story set in apocalyptic times.
27 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 28, 2016
10 people want to read
About the author
Cate Gardner
45 books103 followersA writer of weird things. Scary only in ink. Stories published in Fantasy, Postscripts and Space & Time. Member of the HWA, SFWA and BFS.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 7, 2016
4.5 stars!
Shadow Moths collects two short stories into one very slim book.
We Make Our Own Monsters Here is a very short story about a puppeteer of sorts going on an audition. It's strange, but I liked it! Check Harding checks in to the Palmerston Hotel, a place he's planning on staying for the night before he goes on an audition in the morning. The hotel is strange, his room is strange and Check himself is VERY strange. He passes the night practicing his shadow puppets on the wall and the next morning, takes the bus to his audition. I can't say much more without spoiling this weird tale, but I can say that I loved it and I wish it were longer. I have a thing for puppeteers, (shadow or otherwise), and if you do too, I think you will enjoy this eerie little tale.
Blood Moth Kiss was another short, but strange story. It was rather surreal and well...shadowy. I'm not quite sure I understand what happened, but in my opinion, I think this was a vignette about war and our fears; be they real or imagined, like the blood moths exploding throughout this tale. In either case, war is sad for everyone involved, on all sides, and that's what I'm taking away from Blood Moth Kiss.
Both of these stories are beautifully written and evocative. I've not heard of Cate Gardner until earlier today, but now that I've read a few tasty treats from her library, I think I'd like to read a few more.
Highly recommended!
You can buy your copy here: Shadow Moths: Frightful Horrors Quick Reads
*I received a free e-copy of this short book in exchange for my honest review. This is it.*
Shadow Moths collects two short stories into one very slim book.
We Make Our Own Monsters Here is a very short story about a puppeteer of sorts going on an audition. It's strange, but I liked it! Check Harding checks in to the Palmerston Hotel, a place he's planning on staying for the night before he goes on an audition in the morning. The hotel is strange, his room is strange and Check himself is VERY strange. He passes the night practicing his shadow puppets on the wall and the next morning, takes the bus to his audition. I can't say much more without spoiling this weird tale, but I can say that I loved it and I wish it were longer. I have a thing for puppeteers, (shadow or otherwise), and if you do too, I think you will enjoy this eerie little tale.
Blood Moth Kiss was another short, but strange story. It was rather surreal and well...shadowy. I'm not quite sure I understand what happened, but in my opinion, I think this was a vignette about war and our fears; be they real or imagined, like the blood moths exploding throughout this tale. In either case, war is sad for everyone involved, on all sides, and that's what I'm taking away from Blood Moth Kiss.
Both of these stories are beautifully written and evocative. I've not heard of Cate Gardner until earlier today, but now that I've read a few tasty treats from her library, I think I'd like to read a few more.
Highly recommended!
You can buy your copy here: Shadow Moths: Frightful Horrors Quick Reads
*I received a free e-copy of this short book in exchange for my honest review. This is it.*
September 22, 2016
I'm a big fan of Cate Gardner's writing and these two darkly weird tales didn't disappoint. They're well crafted stories packed with fantastic imagery - sometimes spooky, sometimes poignant, but always memorable. Great stuff.
February 5, 2017
Gardner is one of the most exciting voices in the horror genre right now - her vivid, unsettling imagery and surreal imagination are tempered by a core of genuine feeling. I especially loved ‘Blood Moth Kiss’ - a genre-bending tale imbued with an undercurrent of dread and helplessness. Gardner's strength lies in her ability to provoke feeling from an abstract premise, and while the nature of events might be impossible to pin down – fluttering just out of reach like Nola’s blood moths – the emotions they provoke are unquestionably real.
January 25, 2021
nullimmortalis August 31, 2016 at 2:48 pm Edit
WE MAKE OUR OWN MONSTERS HERE
“All the same, Check picked up his bag, which was no weight at all. It only contained socks and hope.”
Some writers have the knack to turn the throwaway line (or deadpan caprice or straight-faced fantasy amid otherwise humdrum or seedy life) into haunting nightmares as well as dry conceits. Cate Gardner, in my experience, is one of those, and here she takes her knack into confidently understated overdrive.
Check checks into the hotel, and follows and is followed by shadows, and by a helpmate chambermaid – from, for me, some off-kilter alternative Wonderland – a helpmate in garnering him a puppeteer’s job at the end of the bus route.
The work’s deadpan throwaway straight-faced loop of a musical ‘dying fall’ ending is just that. As if Wonderland becomes – or always was – reflected in or by or from a desiccated leminscate Glass Darkly “…raining as ashes.”
nullimmortalis September 1, 2016 at 9:34 am Edit
BLOOD MOTH KISS
“The moths he referred to were the girls who flirted with the guys in uniform.”
This story affected me deeply. It reminded me of my own mother’s true stories of her young womanhood when she, too, frequented such bars described in this story; this was during the Second World War; she often walked home in the darkness of the blackout sometimes beset by a Blitz raid; she eventually met my soldier father in one such foray; she passed away a few months ago.
This story, although with its own deadpan futuristic quality, with blood moths of Blitz or desiccated confetti messages of balm, turned to raining ashes, I imagine, in its deadpan darkness. This, otherwise, is also a beautifully oblique dystopia of war, of ghosts made and moths as quick-read, quick-red ‘objective correlatives’ for a nightmarish, but human-touching, vision. We shall all apply this vision separately for our own purging purposes, I guess. It also has that gestalt pattern of a leminscate loop already adumbrated by the first quick-read of puppet shadows above.
It is always 8.15 a.m. – the time I happened to ring my mother’s landline every morning in recent years. I was her only child.
end
WE MAKE OUR OWN MONSTERS HERE
“All the same, Check picked up his bag, which was no weight at all. It only contained socks and hope.”
Some writers have the knack to turn the throwaway line (or deadpan caprice or straight-faced fantasy amid otherwise humdrum or seedy life) into haunting nightmares as well as dry conceits. Cate Gardner, in my experience, is one of those, and here she takes her knack into confidently understated overdrive.
Check checks into the hotel, and follows and is followed by shadows, and by a helpmate chambermaid – from, for me, some off-kilter alternative Wonderland – a helpmate in garnering him a puppeteer’s job at the end of the bus route.
The work’s deadpan throwaway straight-faced loop of a musical ‘dying fall’ ending is just that. As if Wonderland becomes – or always was – reflected in or by or from a desiccated leminscate Glass Darkly “…raining as ashes.”
nullimmortalis September 1, 2016 at 9:34 am Edit
BLOOD MOTH KISS
“The moths he referred to were the girls who flirted with the guys in uniform.”
This story affected me deeply. It reminded me of my own mother’s true stories of her young womanhood when she, too, frequented such bars described in this story; this was during the Second World War; she often walked home in the darkness of the blackout sometimes beset by a Blitz raid; she eventually met my soldier father in one such foray; she passed away a few months ago.
This story, although with its own deadpan futuristic quality, with blood moths of Blitz or desiccated confetti messages of balm, turned to raining ashes, I imagine, in its deadpan darkness. This, otherwise, is also a beautifully oblique dystopia of war, of ghosts made and moths as quick-read, quick-red ‘objective correlatives’ for a nightmarish, but human-touching, vision. We shall all apply this vision separately for our own purging purposes, I guess. It also has that gestalt pattern of a leminscate loop already adumbrated by the first quick-read of puppet shadows above.
It is always 8.15 a.m. – the time I happened to ring my mother’s landline every morning in recent years. I was her only child.
end
March 17, 2018
Cate's book is a couple of relatively short stories, and thankfully so. Not because they're badly written, but because they hurt your head when you read them. It's like a glimpse into a world where everything is alien,nothing is as you'd expect,but all is familiar enough to be disconcerting.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews