Half-Minute Horrors

DNF @ 28%

This book sucks. The stories aren't scary at all, but instead are trying way too damn hard to be edgy. Several are just plain inappropriate for the middldgrade (or younger) crowd the writing style and cover art are sure to attract, as well.

I was going to finish this anyway, just to see if anything good was among the sea of terrible stuff, but eventually I just couldn't take it anymore.

I endured parents who murdered their infant and fed it to the unwitting babysitter. I rolled my eyes at a poem a five-year-old could have written about Halloween masks. I sighed at a comic about a painting that pulls a child into its world so the painted person may escape. I was bored by the entire experience... and finally just stopped caring when I reached body shaming.

A bully called a girl fat. The girl thought to herself that, no, she was not fat - the bully and “morons like” her were just anorexic. Then she murdered the bully. My eyes rolled out of my skull and thunked onto the floor after I rolled them so hard. My jaw tendons snapped from the pressure of clenching my teeth so tightly. I closed the book.

I am not going back. It isn't worth the wasted time - and that's saying something, since each story takes less than half a minute to read.

Cute middle grade 1-4 page short horror stories by Lemony Snicket, James Patterson, R. L. Stine, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Connelly, Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood and many others.

I originally stumbled across this while buying up every Atwood novel I could find. This one didn't disappoint. It was a nice, easy seasonal read.