Kindle Customer

Mixed narration and story quality

Revisado: 11-20-24

Pretty standard collection of stories - other volumes in the same series are better. Narrators struggle at times, especially with accents - in particular, there are some really bad Scottish, Irish, and Indian accent attempts and a nearly unlistenable Caribbean story. The stories vary and are stronger on the fantasy side with weaker horror elements. Some interesting new stuff, some repetive horror tropes, and a lot of rehashing of the same "horrors of covid isolation" theme.

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Fine narration not enough to save terrible writing

Revisado: 02-20-23

My first time listening to a Dean Koontz book. Forced myself to listen to the first 4 stories before I gave up. Found my mind wandering and my eyes rolling. This book is perfect for you if you enjoy:

Flat, wooden dialogue that is overly dramatic, unrealistic, and boring all at the same time.

One dimensional, God-loving, good guys and one-dimensional, evil-for-the-sake-of-evil bad guys.

One-dimensional female characters that exist only to move male characters' plotlines along.

Heavy-handed reminiscences about the good old days of the mid-20th century, and endless droning about the moral decline of America in the 80s and 90s.

Getting beaten over the head with overt religious messages. In the title story, the main character is redeemed by reconnecting to his childhood faith, embracing God, and using his rekindled belief to fight his brother who has (literally) sold his sould to the devil and allowed Judas to possess him. Every time he fails, God resets his timeline and allows him to try again until his faith in Jesus finally brings success.

Absolutely terrible. Cannot recommend.

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Audio Issues and missing stories

Revisado: 01-10-23

Narration is fine and stories are good. Would be 4 stars based on those two criteria.

HOWEVER, there's something wrong with the audio levelling - I had to quit listening to the first story as it sounded like the narrator was rapidly getting closer to and further away from the mic. Additionally, the audiobook only contains a subset of the stories that the title description lists. These issues make it feel like a poorly-executed bait and switch.

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Bad writing, boring characters, and xenophobia

Revisado: 10-26-22

Tried listening to ~7 or so stories, could not finish any of them.

Story 1: every young-couple-moves-in-to-a-haunted-house story rolled into one, complete with creepy kid, evil creepy foreigners, a spooky doll, etc. Badly written and, bluntly, offensive in its treatment of anyone not white American. Really leans in to the racist "Roma (although that's not the term they use) are creepy magical evil devil worshippers" trope.

Story: entitled rich guy whines a lot and dreams of living in the summer all year long, goes to Chile to hit on women 20 years younger than himself and bad stuff happens. More trope-y "fear of the exotic foreigner" themes.

and so on and so forth. The narration isn't terrible, but it's not not great and definitely not enough to make up for bad writing, bad story design, and trope-laden, outdated, boring concepts.

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Much better than expected

Revisado: 01-30-22

There's a lot of really, really bad short horror out in the world, and Audible is no exception. This selection is surprisingly good - there are certainly some weaker stories and some better ones, but overall it is worth a listen.

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Good narration, redundant stories

Revisado: 11-06-20

It would be a 5/5, but as other reviewers have mentioned, over half the content of the audiobook (and most of the better stories) can be found in the longer "Haggopian and other stories", also by Lumley. Save your money and buy that one, skip this.

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Good if you like Dan Carlin

Revisado: 04-12-20

Not bad! relative short at 8 hours. Unfortunately a little bit redundant if you've listened to his podcast, Hardcore History. The book had more of the weaknesses of HH (lack of cohesive direction, vague conclusions, glory in destruction) and less of its strengths (detailed sourcing, engaging narration, bringing history to life). One thing that threw me off a bit was Dan's use of his narrator "reading a quote" voice for the whole book - it was difficult to distinguish at times where primary source quotes ended and book narration began. All in all, it was enjoyable but not my favorite work that he's done.

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Not bad, but not gripping.

Revisado: 07-18-17

Part of the fault may like with the format (audio), but I never really felt connected to the characters. it wasn't until the last chapter or two that I was able to distinguish even one of the core characters from the others... it was too short to flesh out all the ideas it contained, and ended up feeling very predictable, and linear. like a short story forced in to novel length.

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