Cadaver: Horror Poems

by Alex Hartwell

The world's a scary place, but there's a terrifying universe beyond life and death and Alex Hartwell's " Horror Poems" gives you a front row seat to Hell. In "Dream People", a young family is buried in their own cellar. "Anniversary" depicts the troubled psyche of a man fearing a visit from a vengeful spirit. A malevolent force reduces the inhabitants of a lakeside resort to mere blood and bone in "He". Throughout this poetry anthology, Hartwell marries ghostly apparitions with genuine metaphysical concerns, and in the process creates a literary landscape as beautiful as it is brutal. One thing is for these unhappy endings -- or are they beginnings? -- will haunt your mind long after you've turned the last page.

Genres: Horror

26 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 24, 2020

About the author

Alex Hartwell is a novelist, poet, journalist, screenwriter and script consultant. He is the author of numerous short stories and the novel "No Sunrise," in addition to having worked with film producers in the USA and Australia. On a more personal note, he's very happily married to writer Olivia Hartwell. They have two sons and together they all live in the American Midwest.

If you enjoy his work, please leave a review on Amazon and GoodReads. It really does help spread the word.

Visit his official blog at http://alexhartwellbooks.blogspot.com and say hello!

Reviews

[Gaby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dark and gothic atmosphere were found in these poems.
give it a shot

[S.B. Pearce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully Dark

It was easy to become enraptured by Hartwell's dark lyricism. His mastery of the Gothic image via the written word is divine. His free verse transforms into heightened visual storytelling in a most unique, and sometimes sinister, fashion. I highly recommend!

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

D

Cadaver: Horror Poems is a collection of macabre poems by Alex Hartwell.

Hartwell primarily uses poetry as a form of storytelling. While storytelling allows Hartwell to create vivid imagery, his work doesn't delve deeper into social or philosophical themes. Due to poetry's concise nature, Hartwell can't develop characters as he would in longer forms of writing. As such, both his poetry and stories suffer.

Hartwell's poetry relies heavily on rhymes, but his rhyme scheme is simplistic. This causes his poetry to take on an amateurish sing-song quality. Hartwell's forced rhymes (along with his heavy use of adverbs and adjectives) cause his cadence and sentence structure to feel incongruous.

[Sameen Shakya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cadaver is a slim book of horror poems (as the title suggests). Despite a pretty sick cover, I did not find the book as terrifying as I'd have liked.

To put it simply, it didn’t quite hit the spot but was enjoyable nonetheless. Is there really no frightening horror poetry in the modern age? Must I write one myself? I don't know. This book though, is simply doable.

The poetry itself was good but didn't really do much for me.