The Tricker-Treater and other stories - by Briana Morgan

This was my first Briana Morgan book, I’d approached Briana to get an audiobook copy and unfortunately, she didn’t have codes for my backwater Amazon (Germany), but I’m not one to be deterred, so I grabbed a copy for Briana’s birthday (which took three attempts to get to me!), and approached it with no expectations but an underlying feeling that no matter what I was going to read, I was going to have fun doing so.

Briana’s voice is very easy going, it’s almost chatty, you are in friendly company when you read the book, it’s got the feeling of a BFF telling spooky stories around a campfire – they might try to spook it up, but it’s always going to be your friend that is telling the story. So, the stories themselves have that feel – something to spook you, not outright scare or horrify you. It’s a specific genre of horror, and it delivers exactly that – entertainment.

The eight shorts (including two short-shorts) on offer here show a great span of imagination, we go from witchcraft to paranormal entity, to possession, to haunted houses – so from a range perspective this is pretty broad. As with most collections of shorts, some hit home harder than others.

There were a couple of shorts here that didn’t work for me as horror stories exactly – “The dive” and “The session” for example, though both held horror elements, I just didn’t connect with them, though as short stories each packed impact. For me, the stand out horror story was the short “The mistake house”, there’s a fantastic line up-front that, as you read it, just immediately makes you sit up and think – Damn that line was good:

“We moved in seven months ago, and we should have moved out right away. The house was all wrong then, and now, so are we.”

And it’s moments like that which show you glimpses of what I think Briana is going to become now she has committed herself to her writing full time – her versatility here is all on display, but the flashes of brilliance are like cherry pickings just waiting to be expanded upon.

Moratorium was likewise a good short-short, something which it is clear is a strength of Morgan's - it's incredibly hard to create a short that runs to only two pages that leaves the reader thinking - damn, what a great idea - but that's what Briana does, and well.

It’s a hard call to rate, I’m going to give it a 4 out of 5⭐’s because this is a gutsy, friendly, lovingly put-together collection of shorts from a really lovely person, with a whole lot to offer the horror community. Briana, you have my interest. Now blow me away with a novel.

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You can buy The Tricker-Treater by clicking on the Amazon store appropriate to you.

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