Reviews
The following review appeared in Whispers of Wickedness’s Web Whisperin’ October 2007 edition:
“Edited by Christopher Death, Midnight Horror is hosted by Fortune City and so comes complete with the usual bushel of adverts, which some may find off putting though personally I didn’t think them overly intrusive. It publishes three times a year, ‘everything from dark fantasy to science fiction with a horror twist’, with 6k as the upper word limit. Site design is basic, with very little in the way of visuals, adornment rather than illustration, albeit what we do get is eye catching. My favourite was the dinosaur looming over a building, but you can have too much of a good thing, and this appears on every single story page, occupying almost half the screen, with text pushed over to the right and brushing up against the border so that you can’t help wondering if some of it has overlapped.
The September 2007 issue, the second to be posted, contains four slices of flash fiction and two longer works. Of the three stories that I read Ghost House by Tom Johnstone was the longest and least successful, told as it is the form of a series of e-mails from a soldier stationed at the Ghost House of the title to his wife (it’s hard to believe that the military would allow this man to send uncensored communications such as this, or that he would have time or inclination to do so as the world shatters around him). The central concept of the story, local resistance fighters mutating thanks to American bio-weapons, is interesting, but the artificiality of the telling just doesn’t convince, while some of the details just seem too close to plot conveniences. Mama’s Makeover by Dawn Sholun runs in at about a hundred words (could even be a drabble if I was anal enough to count them), not one of which is wasted in a wry piece that has raving insanity lurking just beneath the surface of the matter of fact narration. It could be even more blackly comedic to American readers, for whom mention of PBS may have greater significance. Though the Z word is never used, Dead Man is an entertaining twist on the subgenre of the flesh eating zombie, which author Eric S Brown has specialised in. It neatly sells the reader a dummy, setting us up for the final sting in the tail.”
