extreme fear. It lurks in the night, around you, it chokes you when your mind roams. Terror is hearing footsteps when you’re alone in your home, terror is hearing noises in the darkness, seeing shadows move when everything is still.
What are you afraid of? Nothing. Everything. It could be your friend or neighbor, it could be a stranger. It could be something far more sinister. Terror reminds you that you are alive.
Step into the twilight zone and let these masters of terror whisper into your ear.
Skywatcher Press does it again with an excellent anthology. With a theme as broad as "TERROR", the stories include a little bit of everything. Within these pages, you'll find nightmares and ghosts, old gods and underwater horrors. There are people at the end of their rope doing terrible things. There are aliens and robots, desperate parents, doomsday cults, and sadistic doctors. Really, whatever your horror drug of choice is, you're like to find it here.
The unspoken theme which I found to run through all the stories is that of the unhappy ending. There's no happily-ever-afters here, no answers, no closure. There's just a whole lot of people getting slammed with the reality that the world we live in can be an awful place, and terrible things can and do happen to decent people.
All the stories are good but I have to spend a moment on three which stood out above the rest for me.
The first is Dan Allen's tale, "Finkler", which takes place in a psychiatric hospital and jumps back and forth in time between the 1940s and the 1990s. It tells of a doctor who was a little too fond of amputations and lobotomies, and of the simple-minded but powerful young boy who called forth a storm of supernatural proportions to save himself from the doctor's knife.
The second is "The Bell Tower", by Mark Dubovec. This one tells the tale of a priest who lives alone in an old church after the zombie apocalypse robs him of his congregation and his friends. Every Sunday he climbs the bell tower and rings the bell, not to call people to worship, but to call all the nearby zombies so he can pick them off one by one and then give them the Last Rites as he drags them to a mass grave in the woods. Until one day, the bell attracts something else altogether.
The third is something which I have never seen done in an anthology before: Victoria Hancox's choose-your-own-adventure style story, "Black Death and Bluebells". If you've read Hancox's horror gamebook, NIGHTSHIFT, you will recognize some characters here. It is not, however necessary to have read that book to enjoy this story. Hancox has crafted, once again, a series of scenes in which the reader must keep track of clues, items, and codes, and figure out riddles to find their way out of the hellish plague-doctor nightmare that she drops them into.
This collection is a mish-mash, smorgasbord, cornucopia of horrific delights, sure to have something for everyone.
Matthew Hollis Damon & Others – Unleashed Anthology Bk 2 – Terror Unleashed – Reviewed 2/28/22 – Read 2/26-27/22
Looking for a good horror collection, look no further; here it is!
Terror Unleashed is a collection of exciting and horrifying scenarios. It is safe to say that this is another exciting read from this collection of authors. The talent of every one of the authors impressed me. They have been in print with other books and have shown their talents even in other genres.
Each story will give you some stimulating and hold your breath situations. When you compare these to our current pandemic, you can certainly see that it could have been worse than it has been. All in all, if you are a fan of horror anthologies, then I highly recommend this series for your hide in the closet reading pleasure.