Someone to share my nightmares - by Sonora Taylor

This was my first Sonora Taylor book, and I’d heard good things about her writing, for some reason I had associated her name with sexual horror – I can’t say where that influence came from or why, but yeah, I associate her name with horror combined with sex, along with V. Castro, who I have also still not read (I’m getting there!), so I have no idea if that predisposition is in any way fair. Regardless, having written a longer sex scene into my own book, and knowing how hard it is to come up with new ways of saying “penis” or “nipples” over and over again, I was actually happy to see how another of my genre’s writers tackled the problem. Writing a sex scene was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, it’s not something that came naturally, and was a test I set myself to stop being scared of that genre. So – here’s someone that has embraced that sub-genre of Horror. How did they approach it?

Sonora writes primarily horror, it turns out, with sex thrown in now and then to spice the horror up. Is that a fair comment of all of her writing? I have no idea, but that is how the sex felt in these 11 stories. Sometimes that turn of emotions into sexual release worked, sometimes, for me, it didn’t. This is a short story collection, and that’s always going to be true in collections, some stories hit you more than others. And not all of the stories are sexual. So that stomped on my preconceptions.

For me, the stand-out stories in this collection were “The Sharps”, “’tis better to want”, and “Someone to share my nightmares”. The breadth of stories is good here, from vampires to Krampus, from leech frogs to cursed plumbing. Sonora has a distinctive voice, and her passion for her characters is evident. I didn’t, however, feel engaged in all of the shorts, or connect with many of the MCs, but that isn’t always going to be the case in a collection.

I think I can best describe this as something that has whetted my appetite for more of Sonora’s voice – but perhaps something with more meat on its bones? I’ll be checking out more of Sonora’s writing, perhaps “seeing things” next, to see how her longer stories compare.

3 out of 5 ⭐ ‘s

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You can buy Someone to share my nightmares by clicking on the Amazon store appropriate to you.

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