Customer Reviews

Around a Dark Corner

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The second story in this book, "A Medieval Tale of Plague" tells the story of a young girl in 1348, the plague has decimated London and killed her employer. She feels obligated to get him in the ground before she gets out of town and before the story is through she is going to have to kill to do it. Jeani Rector puts you right in this child's head, makes you see though her eyes and the sight isn't pretty, but it's real.

The third story, "A Spirit of Death" is about trust. If your girlfriend all of a sudden wants you to dig up an old skull out of a graveyard, if she summons up evil spirits and if you waver and she asks you to trust her, to believe in her, tells you everything is going to be okay if you just go along with her, I don't care how hot she is, you might want to seriously question her actions. Our hero doesn't and-- well, that would be telling, just read the story and be scared.

The last story, the novella, is called "A Teenage Ghost Story," and you know right from the get go there is going to be some creepy, scary stuff going on in it. With an opening line like "Are you afraid of graveyards?" Well, you know if our erstwhile teenage heroine isn't yet, she's gonna be.

There is a whole lot of frightening, spine-chilling, neck-tingling stuff happening between these pages. If you haven't read Jeani Rector yet, it's time you did, because your missing a great storyteller. This is recommended reading for Richard Laymon fans, for lovers of Messers Koontz and King, for those who crave the descriptive horror of Clive Barker and for anybody who likes a good scare or a touch of irony or well told story. This book is full of knee-knockers and teeth-chatterers. Start reading and the sweat will start dripping, salting your eyes and chilling your under arms. When I finished, I went right back to the start and read it all again.

Around a Dark Corner is aptly named because it's one of the best horror anthologies I've ever read. Of course, I knew better than to walk around any dark corners while reading this, but even in the comfort of my home, Jeani Rector had me clutching the arms of my chair and gasping with every page I turned. She's absolutely the best in this genre, but as the founder of Horror-Zine, the most popular on-line horror magazine, I expected no less from her.

Usually when I read an anthology, there are two or three stories that I'm luke-warm about and there are often a few I simply just don't "get." This book is different because I loved all nine of the shorts and the novella. My very favorite short is "Lady Cop," and the novella "A Teenage Ghost Story" is to die for... Well, not literally. :-)

I highly recommend this book, but Rector also has a more recent volume out. She complied, edited and contributed her own shorts to an anthology composed of the best short stories published in the Horror-Zine. It's an e-book titled What Fears Become: An Anthology from The Horror Zine. Please check my review of that book.

Move over Shirley Jackson, your worst fear is about to come true: Jeani Rector is around your next dark corner!

Reviewed by Betty Dravis, September 27, 2011
Author of "Millennium Babe: The Prophecy" and other books

I love all Jeani Rector's books. The one I'm reviewing tonight is Around a Dark Corner. The stories are all great and she leaves you wanting to learn more about each story.
My favorites are:
The Spirit of Death
Only love would make a young man do everything a girl asks of him, which altimately means death for someone.
Maggots
You think Doctors are wise beyond their years. How else can they solve when a body was murdered. Read this story and you may find out more than you could imagine.
A Teenage Ghost Story
This is a cool story. Teenagers visiting a grave yard, see how they find out who murdered a family in 1935.
I encourage everyone who like tales of terror to buy one of Jeani Rector's books and settle down for a scary evening. I'm reading one of her other books too. As soon as I finish it I will write a review on it as well.
Thanks Jeani, for great books to read!
Debbie

Around a Dark Corner is Ms. Rector's third collection of stories, following Open Grave (2008) and After Dark (2006), and features nine short stories and a novella. It's a mixed bag in a couple of different ways; first of all, Jeani covers a variety of topics, from ancient ceremonial magic to modern serial killers to the horrors of the bubonic plague. Secondly, the stories range from `reasonable' to `great,' as you'd expect from any writers' collection.

Standout stories from this collection include `The Dead Man,' `Horrorscope,' `Maggots' and the novella, `A Teenage Ghost Story.' They feature a killer in the moments immediately following a murder, another killer guided by his newspaper horoscope, a scientist and student interested in insects' role in forensics and two teenage girls solving a ghost mystery, respectively.

Stories I didn't particularly like include `The Spirit of Death' and `In Any Language.' This is probably a simple matter of personal preference, as I found the former predictable and the latter just hard to get through. `Flight 529' and `The Golem' weren't stories as much as plain old retellings of a plane crash and an old Hebrew legend; even these stories, while failing to meet the standard of some of the others in the collection, still showcase Rector's talent with words.

Finally, two stories just flat out need to be developed into separate books of their own. `A Medieval Tale of Plague,' a story of a young woman's struggle for survival in plague-stricken medieval England, takes place in a beautifully crafted setting and features an appealing protagonist. It's only a few subplots and some serious conflicts away from being a great standalone novel. Similarly, `Lady Cop' features an interesting female lead, a gripping murder mystery and detailed police and coroner procedures that obviously involved some quality research on Rector's part, but it's too straightforward and wraps up too quickly. A few more twists and turns and a subplot or two and this one would also be a great standalone.

The bottom line? I give this one an 7.5/10 and I'll definitely add Ms. Rector's other books to my ever-growing wish list.

Around a Dark Corner is Jeani Rector's third collection of short stories/novella. It features nine short stories and one novella. Ms. Rector has surpassed herself here and is fully in command of her craft, giving us her best collection yet. I'll go through some of my favorite stories before getting to the meat of the book, A Teenage Ghost Story, the novella.

She opens up the book with a quick tale with a twist ending worthy of Alfred Hitchcock himself titled "The Dead Man". Then there's "A Medieval Tale of Plague" which borders on being literature about a young girl trying to survive the bubonic plague. It's extremely well written and keeps you glued to the page for the duration. "The Spirit of Death" which originally appeared in the gothic anthology Sinister Landscapes is one of the three best of the book about a woman seeking immortality. "Horrorscope" is a gruesome tale of a man that takes horoscopes a little too seriously. A longer story also worthy of mention is "Lady Cop" which shows us a rookie cop haunted and obsessed by the discovery of her first corpse. There are a few more stories which were all quite good but these are the best of the bunch in my opinion.

Now for the meat of the book; the novella. A Teenage Ghost Story is an excellent ghost story like you don't read too often anymore in horror books these days. It has all the classic elements of the ghost story made famous by M.R. James. In keeping with that tradition, Ms. Rector pens a nice back story to the main plot. The tale focuses on Cat, a teenager who believes she saw a ghost in a graveyard that had a message for her. Later, the ghost--or whoever the person in the graveyard was--visits her in her dreams and puts her in the path of one of the town's dark secrets. This begins a quest for Cat and her friend Tara that will lead them into the town's history and culminate on Halloween night. It's an engaging read from beginning to end and it makes you wish Ms. Rector would write longer works more often.

If you're looking for a great collection of eerie and scary tales this Halloween, Around a Dark Corner is the book for you. Jeani Rector shows us once more that she has a unique talent and she weaves some memorable stories in this book. The novella is terrific and dare I say worth the price of the book alone. Highly recommended!

Alan Draven,
Author of Bitternest
and Creeping Shadows

What an amazing collection of stories. No one could have put together something so natural, so thought provoking as this author. I could not put the book down for even a second.

Around a Dark Corner is the best book yet by Rector. Each tale is unique, alternating between classically-written creepiness to modern thrillers. The book contains tales of witchcraft, time travel, insanity, plague, and so on. Each tale is wildly imaginative. Fans of Poe, Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, etc. will like this.

Jeani Rector writes noir fiction in an original way. Don't expect gore and axes to leap into your face from her pages but you will squirm with discomfort. Luckily, the gore is on her characters' faces and yet it is under your skin that the real horror lurks. You could walk away but instead you will feel compelled to read on.

There are nine short stories and an intriguing novella - a ghost story in which a teenager reluctantly walks through a graveyard she finds the expected terror but not without being fascinated by it.

The anthology ranges from medieval to modern revealing that the years have yet to ease the horror potential life has to offer. One of my favourites is A Medieval Tale of Plague, possibly because I have researched the era (one of the fifteenth century plagues rather than the overdone 1665 Great Plague, so kudos to Rector for a wise choice of plague!). In this medieval plague we experience disease-ridden London through Elissa. She survives but succumbs to the horrors having to handle the rotten flesh of her dead employer. She enlists the help of a street urchin, who could be after her purse; so many bad things hide around the next corner. Although Elissa doesn't succumb to the plague herself, the ordeal of moving around the pestilence is satisfyingly grim.

Horrorscope (what a brilliant title) is a neat story based on a man who takes his horoscope too literally and along with his hammer engineers an unexpected twist.

Lady Cop is a visual story with two main characters as patrol officers following the discovery of a body in the woods. American setting with an authentic feel. The lady cop is distinctly different from her initially sexist male partner but the two create a workable tension right to the end. Good job.

A clever yet understated story is Flight 529 in which we follow a passenger going through dire emotions as he faces `certain' death as the plane plunges.

There's more subtlety to this collection than in most horror anthologies. A modern penny dreadful with all the evil we've come to expect from Jeani Rector.