DNF p. 55. After reading the first four short stories in Benjamin Percy's collection, I decided that was quite enough. Percy is a gifted writer at times, with a keen view into human nature and a near-command of contextual details that paint believable pictures in a myriad of disparate settings. It's just that this is not a good story genre for him, because he really does it a disservice here.

What could have been a treasury of intelligent and genuinely spooky vignettes set in the rural, frigid Midwest repeatedly ends up as a series of immature gore-fantasies that physically repulse rather than raise the hairs. The first four selections all start out with intricate and engrossing introductions that convey immaculate background color, and then quickly devolve to gotcha-type cautionary tales that often rely on corporeal ultraviolence to shock the audience. It almost feels as if these scenarios were written by two people: one to provide the setting and characters and one to corrupt them with rote physical and emotional brutality. On more than one occasion the stories left me feeling disgusted rather than entranced, with descriptive violence toward animals and human children that just doesn't do anything to enhance the narrative. Two of the four tales that I read end abruptly in awkward places, showing me that Percy doesn't quite have a line on the pacing of supernatural/horrific micro-stories.

They may get better later in the collection, but I can't convince myself to forge ahead with such disappointment in my gut. Had Percy eschewed some of the obvious "thriller" tropes and spent more time confronting the human condition and the inner monologues of his main characters, these stories might have been ten times more horrific and, therefore, effective in short-story form. ( )

Good creepy fun, very atmospheric in a specific descriptive way that just gets under your skin. Percy's strength is in the setup—characters, scenery, premise—and a little less so carrying the plot through, but he's good enough at the former to see every story to a satisfyingly scary end. ( )