Review: Girls & Monsters by Anne Michaud

Title: Girls & Monsters

Author: Anne Michaud

Publisher: DarkFuse

Publication Date: April 30th, 2013

Page Count: 194

Buy The Book: Amazon | Barnes and Noble

Rating: 2.5/5

Synopsis

Death Song: Liz is in love with Joe, but the monster of the lake has other plans for them.

Black Dog: Scarlet is engaged in a struggle for her sanity, but according to the voice in her head, she may be too late.

A Blue Story: When Katherine's beloved dog goes missing, she fears her strange new neighbor might be involved.

Dust Bunnies: Christiane faces her childhood arachnophobia and ends up confronting even greater fears in this test of sisterhood.

We Left at Night: Brooke and her family must abandon their home and their lives to make it out of a disease-plagued town overrun by zombies.

Girls & Monsters is for everyone who has ever been brave enough to confront their childhood fears...and lived to tell about it.

Few Wild Words Quickie

An okay collection of novellas, some better than others but definitely a few I enjoyed.

My Thoughts

This was a cool collection of short stories, not all of them appealed to me or were as enjoyable as I hoped. There were definitely a few I liked and were gems in this collection, these included:

Death song - This was a pretty good story. The whole evil mermaid aspect entwined itself into the story well. At the start it was an underlying issue but as the story progressed the evil mermaid began to build itself and became the central challenge in the story.

Black dog - I enjoyed this one I great deal out of all of them, mostly because of how it presented the internal struggle as the monster. It was powerful and crafted the story in a way to portray the conflict throughout. It was eye opening to be in the mind of someone suffering from a mental illness and the rollercoaster they were on. There are flashbacks used, usually they would bore me but in this story it gives you pieces of the past which combines to tell you the character's background and how she had come to that particular point. The ending was beautifully written and I was left wanting to find out more.

A Blue Story - I actually didn't expect to like this one much, it hadn't seemed like something I'd enjoy reading. However, this one was a pleasant surprise. I liked the characters and you do get to know them a bit within a short space of time. The pace of the mystery was fast but I didn't mind as it got straight to the point. One down side for me was that I'm not really an animal lover so I couldn't relate to Katherine's pain much. Overall, it was a cool mystery.

All that said and done, none of them were particularly mindblowing but each held an original story of its own.

Anyone read any good short story collections that they'd like to recommend?