Book Review: "Darkened Horizons, Issue 3"

Darkened Horizons, Issue 3 is horror-themed anthology published through Lulu. Several weaknesses that are often seen in the work of writers still learning their craft recurred in the majority of the stories in this anthology. The first, and most common, was the tendency to "over-write" and use stilted language, big words, and complex sentence constructions where more simple and direct language would be much more effective. The second is the lack of specificity, glossing over details that would make the story come alive. Finally, in several stories, the authors used a lot of dialogue tags besides "said", a classic beginner problem.

That said, two stories that stood out were "The Sliding" by Kevin Lucia and "Apartment J" by Gabrielle Faust. In "The Sliding", a boyhood experience comes back to haunt a man. I liked the Lovecraftian overtones to the story, namely the idea of a curious explorer (the boys) discovering a powerful evil better left alone.

In "Apartment J", a young woman confronts her neighbor about strange noises coming from the neighbor's apartment and finds more than she bargained for. I think that bad things happening to decent people is much scarier than bad things happening to bad people, and this story delivers in that regard.

The two stories disappointed me the most (because they failed to capitalize on interesting and original ideas) were "Mr. Fucking Bothersome" by Dave Rex and "Flower in the Wind" by Rick McQuiston. The opening sentence of "Mr. Fucking Bothersome" proposes, "Imagine...our world without religion." However, instead of taking a hard look at this, and perhaps exploring some of the two thousand years of philosophical thought regarding ethics and morals, the story takes the easy and predictable route. In the world of the story, people have no morals and do anything they please.

In "Flower in the Wind", the world is suddenly afflicted with hurricane-force winds, forcing the four characters in the story to take refuge in a cave. I liked the twist at the end, but the typos and the general writing problems I mentioned above dragged the story down.

The worst two stories were "Damnation Observes" by Nickolaus Pacione and "The Red Cloud Affliction" by Stanley Anderson. In "The Red Cloud Affliction", a student finds his teacher dead in his classroom, and in fulfilling his teacher's final request, the student starts a deadly chain reaction. The problem is that the story has no context; it occurs in a vacuum of details such as the time period, location, age of students, etc. It was also difficult to follow the action, and POV jumped in the latter part of the story.

I still haven't figured out what the appallingly bad "Damnation Observes" is about. The writing is so rambling, ungrammatical, filled with illogical sentences, and repetitive that it gave me a headache. The problems included incomplete sentences (and not the kind authors do on purpose to emphasize a point), subject/verb disagreement, misused words, comma splices, etc. This story is a shining example of how not to write, and I am puzzled as to why it was even included in this anthology. It is clearly bad, bad writing.

Overall score: 4 out of 10. If have $2.99 to spare for the PDF version, it's not a complete waste of money.