Lisa Loves Literature: Blog Tour: Review and Giveaway

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Blog Tour: Review and Giveaway - Scary Out There

Book info:

Title: Scary Out There
Author: Various YA authors
Editor: Jonathan Maberry
Genre: YA Horror
Published: August 30, 2016
Source: e-galley from Edelweiss

ABOUT SCARY OUT THERE:
Multiple Bram Stoker Award–winning author Jonathan Maberry compiles more than twenty stories and poems—written by members of the Horror Writers Association—in this terrifying collection about worst fears.

What scares you? Things that go bump in the night? Being irreversibly different? A brutal early death? The unknown?

This collection contains stories and poetry by renowned writers such as R. L. Stine, Neal and Brendan Shusterman, and Ellen Hopkins—all members of the Horror Writers Association—about what they fear most. The stories include mermaids, ghosts, and personal demons, and are edited by Jonathan Maberry, multiple Bram Stoker award winner and author of the Rot and Ruin series.

LINKS: Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Indiebound | iBooks

My Review:
I'm very grateful that I got to read this, as I am a fan of Jonathan Maberry, the editor, for one thing, and secondly because there were several other authors I really enjoyed who contributed to this scary story collection. I have to admit, that being a fan of Stephen King, scary story collections are usually my favorite. And overall, the majority of the stories in this collection did not disappoint. Of course there were some that I enjoyed more than others, and one or two that just didn't work for me, but altogether it is a collection I will be highly recommending to people, including my high school students.

Some of my favorites were the video game story by Brenna Yovanoff, The Doomsday Glass. I'm not the hugest fan of video game stories, other than the two books by Ernest Cline, Ready Player One and Armada, but Yovanoff, a favorite author of mine, totally blew this first story in the collection out of the ball park. Neal and Brendan Shusterman also wrote a pretty good video game story, the twist in it being that it was the parents who had been sucked into the video game instead of their kid.

The Christopher Golden story, What Happens When the Heart Just Stops, was really good, and it left me hoping that maybe the author would take it and develop it into a longer story, there was so much more I wanted to know about this world. Of course the RL Stine story was good.

As I was finishing the book, there were two that stood out as favorites. First was Kendare Blake's Chlorine-Damaged Hair, and Other Pool Hazards, which I could totally see made into a horror movie. The second was Corazon Oscuro, by Rachel Caine. There was a bit of a twist at the end that I didn't see coming, and I could definitely see it as a horror movie as well.

Finally, the one by an author who I hadn't heard of before, Steve Rasnic Tem, that I liked the best was called The Boyfriend. This book included clowns, or one main one, and it was reminiscent to me of when I first read about the clown Pennywise in Stephen King's It.

The majority of the ones that disappointed me or that I didn't enjoy as much were the ones that were prose, other than Ellen Hopkins of course, she knows how to do those. And there was another author that is a favorite author of mine that had a story that just didn't quite grab me for a change, and that was the story by Zac Brewer. It wasn't bad, just not as good as Brewer's past stories.

About Jonathan Maberry:

JONATHAN MABERRY is a New York Times best-selling and multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning horror and thriller author, magazine feature writer, playwright, content creator and writing teacher/lecturer. His books have been sold to more than a dozen countries.

LINKS: Website | Twitter | Facebook

Giveaway: