One exceptionally bad story. One story that is well written but lacking in pizzazz. One that needs work and lacks a bit in the originality zone.



A Dry Drowning
Andrew Ian Dodge
www.templeofdagon.com/wri...wdodge.htm
The problem here is the story. Not the writing. I didn’t find it horrifying or dark. A band of people committed to fighting the minions of Cthulu investigate a drowning. The flavor is more that of the old Fu Manchu novels, than of H. P. Lovecraft, with a twist of the supernatural investigator genre. It is fairly clear, straight forward in its prose tyle. The subject matter is old hat. I believe that if Dodge tried for something truly original he could achieve something. So far he’s the most accomplished writer here.


Lake Fossil
Nickolaus A. Pacione
www.house-of-pain.com/
www.fictionpress.com/~nickolauspacione
Nessie is in the Great Lakes. The meandering, unfocused prose, glaring grammatical errors, endless repetition of things already said, make this one extremely hard to read and so far is the worst story in the anthology. Even when a sentence works, it is so blaise as to invite skimming over. It fails to hook the reader. The characterization is non-existent.



The Third Rule
By Nicholas S. Stember

Nicholas S. Stember
www.authorsden.com/nsstember
parvee.ho8.com/nicholasstember.html

El Diablo visits a sorority house in Massachusetts. Sometimes it is possible to take an old and tired meme and blow life into it. The Third Rule tries, and fails.

This one ignores the principal tenets of strong writing: don’t use excessive adverbs, they weaken the verbs. A lot of his metaphors don’t work:

“Juanita gently pushed out of his arms, fighting the tears that tried to come now as the utter revulsion of his touch swarmed over her like a rotten burlap sack.”

Burlap sacks don’t swarm.

The Genie in the Bottle twist at the end has been done to death in other genres, like fantasy, and I don’t feel that it really works here.