Rating: 4/5, good
I really enjoyed this book! It’s comprised of four short horror stories with plenty of blood, guts, and chaos.
In the first one, “Emma”, a group of “party girls” get terrorized by a haunted virtual assistant.
In the second, “A Grave Situation”, an abusive executive is dogged by undead unfortunates he took advantage of.
In the third, “Slime Dwellers”… if I say what the premise is, it’ll spoil it, so I’ll just say that it’s as sexy as it is scary.
In the fourth, “Gnome More, Gnome More”… I also won’t spoil that one, but it does literally involve garden gnomes and it’s equal parts humor and carnage. It also involves an abusive boyfriend getting his just deserts.
I met George Adamczyk at Las Vegas Comic Con and he described this installment of the Lost Minds, Wandering Souls anthology series as similar to Tales of the Crypt, but while I was reading it I thought of it as “adult Goosebumps” because that was the horror anthology series of my generation (though I do want to watch Tales of the Crypt someday based on how much I liked this book!). He also took care to spell my name correctly when he signed my copy even though Sayre is a bit hard to hear or spell, so points for that!
These stories are pretty simple thematically. Most of them are tales of karmic justice being delivered via supernatural means. The morality is mostly clear (especially in “A Grave Situation”), with evil people getting what they deserve, so it’s more comforting than challenging.
The only part where I raise an eyebrow is where the “party girls” have bad things happen to them, but I’m not sure if that was intended to be a moralistic thing because they liked to party or if it was just mixing horror and sex appeal for maximum interest. I liked the female characters because they were pretty realistic, reasonable, and relatable. There is a bit of sexualization, but they are firmly subjects (as opposed to objects) in their narratives. “Slime Dwellers” and “Gnome More, Gnome More” have a bit of moral ambiguity as well, but I can’t discuss them without spoiling.
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