CBR V Review 7: "Shudderville (1-5)" by Mia Zabrisky

Do you like scary stories, but not so scary that you're up all night wanting (or not) to look under your bed with a flashlight? Creepy stories, kind of along the lines of "The Twilight Zone"? Mia Zabrisky's first few episodes of "Shudderville" are perfect for this time of year.

Mia Zabrisky has created a series of novellas revolving around a man who can grant wishes. But at what cost? Unforeseen circumstances are the order of the day. Supernatural activities, creepy families, scientific discoveries-all are in the "normal" order of things here.

Shudderville 1 kicks off with Sophie, a woman who has taken to drinking heavily after the loss of her daughter in a car accident. When her neighbor tells her he can grant her wish to have her daughter back, and it goes really wrong, she goes looking for him to make him get her daughter back. What we end up finding out is the wish granter, an old man named Tobias Mandelbaum, has had his fingers in more people's lives with his wish granting than we'd ever imagine. Zabrisky intertwines the stories and relates them together in ways that make sense, and explaining the back story of Mandelbaum and others with flashbacks or with stories that have no time period mentioned. Overarching and creepy-scary, Mia Zabrisky's short stories keep me entertained and looking for the next ones. Since I haven't finished the series, though-I can't vouch for how much more scary they get.

I've only read 1-5, and I loved them.

5 stars

CBR V, Review 6: "Read No Evil" by Steven W. White

Ask nearly anyone who reads anything for fun, and they will tell you that certain books can change them, at least temporarily. They'll tell you that it's fun to be transported through words to a different place or time; it's wonderful to be someone different for a while; or that hey, even non-fiction can make you smarter. 

But can a book really change you? Change how you're actually hard-wired to do certain things? Affect your personality permanently? Not in an "I read Atlas Shrugged/Catcher in the Rye so I'm going to be insufferable for a few years" type of way, but real, fundamental, permanent change? What power, good or bad, can a book actually have over a person? What if a book could change you? 

In "Read No Evil", by Steven W. White, the author dives into the theory that a book, specifically a digital e-book, can really change a person. The main conceit of the book is that it's affecting all of these people around this town-suicide, missing persons, violent tendencies-boiled down to this book.

To get to the root of the problem, the protagonist, Jan Fitzgerald, reads the book and we read along with her. Who wrote it? Why? How is affecting everyone? Jan believes she is immune, mostly, to the effects of this book. In one episode, we find out she isn't completely. 

Overall, it was a fairly quick read, and the story-within-the-story is a basic quest, and sadly, not available on Amazon. I really did like this story.