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Four Live Rounds
From the Foreword by J.A.
"As a horror writer, I often get asked what scares me. My answer is always the Blake Crouch. More than any other author working today, Crouch knows how to make the reader squirm. This short story collection is a perfect introduction to Crouch’s skewed world. But before you dive in, please heed my warning. I don’t care how tough you think you are. You still need to brace yourself. Because this is going to hurt…"
From the author of DESERT PLACES, ABANDON, and “Serial,” comes this 21,000-word collection of four short thrillers.
*69 - Tim and Laura West receive a bizarre voicemail on their answering machine that seems to have unintentionally recorded a brutal murder. But what happens when the killer realizes their mistake? This story unfolds over one terrifying evening, and this young couple will never be the same.
REMAKING – Tragic events unfold in a snowy, sleepy Colorado town. From the first scene, in which a man sits alone in the cold, watching a father and son in a diner, you know something is about to go horribly wrong. You may think you know what’s happening, but in this thrilling, heartbreaking story, nothing is as it seems.
ON THE GOOD, RED ROAD - A group of four hard men trying to reach a remote 19th Century mining town become stranded in an early blizzard and resort to drastic, terrifying measures, to stay alive.
SHINING ROCK – An older couple encounter a strange and menacing visitor during a camping trip in the North Carolina mountains. Friendly at first, this stranger seems to know them, seems to know their secrets, and as things escalate, they become convinced that they may never leave these mountains alive.
FOUR LIVE ROUNDS also contains a Foreword by J.A. Konrath, introductions to each story by the author, an interview with Blake, excerpts from all four of his novels, and “The Agreement,” a bonus short story by J.A. Konrath.
About the
BLAKE CROUCH was born near the piedmont town of Statesville, North Carolina in 1978. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated in 2000 with degrees in English and Creative Writing. Blake is the author of four novels and numerous short stories, including “Serial” which he co-wrote with J.A. Konrath and has been downloaded more than 250,000 times. He lives with his family in southwest Colorado, where he is at work on a new book.
Praise for Blake Crouch’s
ABANDON would make an excellent movie, switching back and forth between the plain-but-sturdy homes, saloon and church in 1893 and the same structures rotting to dust in 2009...a clever dual story.
CHARLOTTE OBSERVER
ABANDON [is] two separate works of past and present seamlessly melded together into a single novel that demands to be read in one sitting, so you can better appreciate the beauty of Crouch’s storytelling…[O]ne of those books that almost instantly puts you in the mind of a classic.
BOOKREPORTER
Haunting, fast-paced, and thoroughly engrossing... ABANDON is one of the most original tales of ghosts, greed and gold I've come across. Crouch aligns both eras so perfectly, it's as if the characters are occupying the same breath within the space/time continuum. ABANDON will be one of the most talked-about books of the summer.
THE MADISON COUNTY HERALD
Ambitious…the palpable suspense just keeps building, and many thriller fans—especially those who like a touch of horror—will lose sleep to find out how it all ends.
BOOKLIST
ABANDON is terrific…a great storyteller hitting his stride.
"As a horror writer, I often get asked what scares me. My answer is always the Blake Crouch. More than any other author working today, Crouch knows how to make the reader squirm. This short story collection is a perfect introduction to Crouch’s skewed world. But before you dive in, please heed my warning. I don’t care how tough you think you are. You still need to brace yourself. Because this is going to hurt…"
From the author of DESERT PLACES, ABANDON, and “Serial,” comes this 21,000-word collection of four short thrillers.
*69 - Tim and Laura West receive a bizarre voicemail on their answering machine that seems to have unintentionally recorded a brutal murder. But what happens when the killer realizes their mistake? This story unfolds over one terrifying evening, and this young couple will never be the same.
REMAKING – Tragic events unfold in a snowy, sleepy Colorado town. From the first scene, in which a man sits alone in the cold, watching a father and son in a diner, you know something is about to go horribly wrong. You may think you know what’s happening, but in this thrilling, heartbreaking story, nothing is as it seems.
ON THE GOOD, RED ROAD - A group of four hard men trying to reach a remote 19th Century mining town become stranded in an early blizzard and resort to drastic, terrifying measures, to stay alive.
SHINING ROCK – An older couple encounter a strange and menacing visitor during a camping trip in the North Carolina mountains. Friendly at first, this stranger seems to know them, seems to know their secrets, and as things escalate, they become convinced that they may never leave these mountains alive.
FOUR LIVE ROUNDS also contains a Foreword by J.A. Konrath, introductions to each story by the author, an interview with Blake, excerpts from all four of his novels, and “The Agreement,” a bonus short story by J.A. Konrath.
About the
BLAKE CROUCH was born near the piedmont town of Statesville, North Carolina in 1978. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated in 2000 with degrees in English and Creative Writing. Blake is the author of four novels and numerous short stories, including “Serial” which he co-wrote with J.A. Konrath and has been downloaded more than 250,000 times. He lives with his family in southwest Colorado, where he is at work on a new book.
Praise for Blake Crouch’s
ABANDON would make an excellent movie, switching back and forth between the plain-but-sturdy homes, saloon and church in 1893 and the same structures rotting to dust in 2009...a clever dual story.
CHARLOTTE OBSERVER
ABANDON [is] two separate works of past and present seamlessly melded together into a single novel that demands to be read in one sitting, so you can better appreciate the beauty of Crouch’s storytelling…[O]ne of those books that almost instantly puts you in the mind of a classic.
BOOKREPORTER
Haunting, fast-paced, and thoroughly engrossing... ABANDON is one of the most original tales of ghosts, greed and gold I've come across. Crouch aligns both eras so perfectly, it's as if the characters are occupying the same breath within the space/time continuum. ABANDON will be one of the most talked-about books of the summer.
THE MADISON COUNTY HERALD
Ambitious…the palpable suspense just keeps building, and many thriller fans—especially those who like a touch of horror—will lose sleep to find out how it all ends.
BOOKLIST
ABANDON is terrific…a great storyteller hitting his stride.
121 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 7, 2010
18 people are currently reading
606 people want to read
About the author
Blake Crouch
81 books59.9k followersBlake Crouch is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of the forthcoming novel, Dark Matter, for which he is writing the screenplay for Sony Pictures. His international-bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy was adapted into a television series for FOX, executive produced by M. Night Shyamalan, that was Summer 2015’s #1 show. With Chad Hodge, Crouch also created Good Behavior, the TNT television show starring Michelle Dockery based on his Letty Dobesh novellas. He has written more than a dozen novels that have been translated into over thirty languages and his short fiction has appeared in numerous publications including Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Crouch lives in Colorado with his family.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 27, 2016
Very disapointing, all the the stories were so implausible that it made them unenjoyable.
Read
December 5, 2019Didn't love the one with Oatha, but that is not really my genre. Loved the hiking/camping one, and *69. Good thrillers.
Read
April 3, 20204.5-5
February 13, 2021
I don’t know that I’ll read other horror stories by this author, because I found some of the details here to be rather disturbing. Still, I found the writing to be very engaging. Hard to put down.
April 14, 2021
Pretty scary.
April 28, 2023
Blake Crouch write another great book
February 4, 2024
Fast, fun reads.
January 4, 2012
Merry Christmas to me, because quite a few authors I had on my watch list offered free e-books on the Kindle Store this past Christmas. Blake Crouch was chief among them, I dare say, as he had several listed as freebies for a week or two. I think I downloaded them all, including this collection of four short stories. Four Live Rounds was my first time reading Blake's work that was not a collaboration with another author, so I was very interested to see how good he did on his own compared to the thrillrides he writers with J.A. Konrath and others.
"*69" starts with an interesting concept: what if someone's cell phone inadvertently called you while that person was committing a murder? Pretty creepy, especially if you've ever gotten one of those odd calls where there's no one on the other line, but you can hear something like breathing or some kind of commotion. In Blake's story, after the initial phone call, there's a quaintness to the married couple pondering who might have called and whether they actually overheard someone's murder. But the story quickly ramps up as their suspicions escalate and their actions to learn the truth cross a couple of lines. A really strong opener for this collection.
"Remaking" is a tragic bit of work strikes a nerve considering the number of times you hear about a child abduction on the six-o-clock news. If I had to pick a runt from this litter of stories, "Remaking" would be it, but it's still one that kept me hooked until the end because the man's torment and how it threatened the safety of the child was chilling.
"On the Good, Red Road" is a western that acts as a prelude of sorts to a novel of Blake's called Abandon. A man tries to make his way to a mining town, but winds up in the couple of a trio of outlaws. Things are tense enough as the guy tries to gauge how best to get away from the villains, but when a sudden blizzard leaves them stranded and starving in the middle of nowhere, that's when it really turns into a nail-biter.
"Shining Rock" struck me as a story with a really strong start and finish, but there was a piece in the middle that strained my credulity. A married couple are on a romantic excursion in the bucolic fields of a park called Shining Rock, and are approached by a lone man from a neighboring campsite who at first seems off-putting with his large knife, but ultimately charms them with smalltalk and pricey booze. But there's something about the lone man and his brief tale of tragedy during drunken chatter that sets the husband on edge and has him wanting to flee the park as soon as possible. I really liked the story overall, but there was one aspect of the wife's reaction to her husband's revelation that didn't feel believable to me. Aside from that, it was probably my favorite story of the four.
It's a nice hodgepodge for anyone who'd care to check out Blake's work for the first time. A little bit of everything, from western to psychological thriller, to horror. There's a larger collection on the Kindle Store called Fully Loaded, which includes these four stories and a bunch more (his collaboration with J.A. Konrath, Serial, among them), so I'll have to check that out sometime, too.
"*69" starts with an interesting concept: what if someone's cell phone inadvertently called you while that person was committing a murder? Pretty creepy, especially if you've ever gotten one of those odd calls where there's no one on the other line, but you can hear something like breathing or some kind of commotion. In Blake's story, after the initial phone call, there's a quaintness to the married couple pondering who might have called and whether they actually overheard someone's murder. But the story quickly ramps up as their suspicions escalate and their actions to learn the truth cross a couple of lines. A really strong opener for this collection.
"Remaking" is a tragic bit of work strikes a nerve considering the number of times you hear about a child abduction on the six-o-clock news. If I had to pick a runt from this litter of stories, "Remaking" would be it, but it's still one that kept me hooked until the end because the man's torment and how it threatened the safety of the child was chilling.
"On the Good, Red Road" is a western that acts as a prelude of sorts to a novel of Blake's called Abandon. A man tries to make his way to a mining town, but winds up in the couple of a trio of outlaws. Things are tense enough as the guy tries to gauge how best to get away from the villains, but when a sudden blizzard leaves them stranded and starving in the middle of nowhere, that's when it really turns into a nail-biter.
"Shining Rock" struck me as a story with a really strong start and finish, but there was a piece in the middle that strained my credulity. A married couple are on a romantic excursion in the bucolic fields of a park called Shining Rock, and are approached by a lone man from a neighboring campsite who at first seems off-putting with his large knife, but ultimately charms them with smalltalk and pricey booze. But there's something about the lone man and his brief tale of tragedy during drunken chatter that sets the husband on edge and has him wanting to flee the park as soon as possible. I really liked the story overall, but there was one aspect of the wife's reaction to her husband's revelation that didn't feel believable to me. Aside from that, it was probably my favorite story of the four.
It's a nice hodgepodge for anyone who'd care to check out Blake's work for the first time. A little bit of everything, from western to psychological thriller, to horror. There's a larger collection on the Kindle Store called Fully Loaded, which includes these four stories and a bunch more (his collaboration with J.A. Konrath, Serial, among them), so I'll have to check that out sometime, too.
April 20, 2011
Nice compact group of short stories. I really enjoyed the last 3 stories more than I did the first. Losing a child is one of my greatest fears so "REMAKING" really tore me up. Blake Crouch is fast becoming one of my favorite authors.
August 10, 2012
It was entertaining, really short. Liked the Shining Rock story the best.
November 11, 2014
Read the first two shorts, skim the rest. Didn't allocate enough words for the characters to develop.
July 29, 2019
Nice quick stories.
Love those kind, always have a twist ending.
Read this again. I just needed something a little twisted and quick.
Love those kind, always have a twist ending.
Read this again. I just needed something a little twisted and quick.
February 23, 2017
I read some of these stories in other books, but they were still good.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews