Genre: Horror
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
Four tales of terror.
Haunting dolls live upstairs in The Doll Lady. A psychotic serial killer is obsessed with Lady Gaga and lets the world know with each murder. A Stranger’s Rope is a modern-day nod to Hitchcock’s Rope and Strangers on a Train. Insected is a sci-fi thriller with deadly insects from another world.
These scary stories will chill you to the bone.
The Review
Matt Converse has taken four really creepy ideas and fleshed them out into stories that were horrific enough that I couldn’t read them before bedtime.
What’s most interesting here is the each of the four long-format short stories is very different from the others. I suspect each was inspired by something in the author’s past that prompted his exploration—something that creeped him out and possibly gave him nightmares.
The Doll Lady is every bit as weird as the title suggests. My only personal experience is my reaction to a room—in a historic house, or a museum, filled with dolls. It can be very unsettling, and Converse pushes this idea to a paranoia-making limit. The lack of a real resolution at the end is even more unnerving.
Gaga for Murder is more straightforward—a serial killer who leaves Lady Gaga music playing at the scene of each killing. The author seems to be aiming at a Grand Guignol gore level (if you don’t know what that is, Google it, you should), and I particularly liked the twist at the end.
A Stranger’s Rope was possibly my favorite, because it apparently refers to two famous psychological thrillers in the film world: “Rope” and “Strangers on a Train.” Converse ratchets up a lot of anxiety and surprise in a setting intended to be placid and genteel. Another one with a nice twist.
Finally, Insected is an homage to the classic sci-fi genre involving alien invasion, which a particularly nasty twist, and a prologue that is more unsettling than the story itself. I don’t know if it was intentional, but the extreme ordinariness of the two main characters (a 90-year-old grandmother in Florida and her middle-aged son in California) was a kind of hilarious choice for a story with this apocalyptic vision.
4 stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
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