Book Review
Title: News Worthy
Author: Lynn Thompson
Genre: Horror/Short Stories
Rating: *****
Review: Having read a few works by Lynn Thompson I had high hopes for News Worthy, and this didn’t disappoint. Like Lynn Thompson’s other collection it has a central theme. The other two were horror and madness, this collection seems to focus on news worthy events.
The first story The Snake in the Cereal I found to be very humorous as well as quite dark. The divorced wife turns out not to be the killer even though she suspect she was and she tried hard to piss him off, but the killer turns out to be her pet snake who her ex-husband was keeping. I laughed a lot especially at the reaction of the wife after finding out her ex-husband was dead. And even the snake as an animal with no real scene time or dialogue is an amazing addition and was a great start to this collection.
I did really connect with The Fire in the Mountains, yes it can be considered a news worthy event, but it was scary or creepy. The emotion this story seems to bring forth is sadness, the sadness of a community, the sadness and grief of a husband for his cremated wife in a mountain fire.
The Man with the Bugs really caught my attention for it ambiguous nature. Do the bugs represent the underage boys he raped or is he just mad, we will never know but it was a fun fast read.
Cannabis Cannibalism -vs- The West Nile Virus is my favorite story in this collection, it combines some of my favorite sub-genres of horror including freak-weather and cannibalism, but it focuses mainly around politics and the death of some major politicians. I absolutely loved the way it was writing with the location skipping and the different points of view as well as some outside information for the news casters reporting on the situations (weather, politics and cannibalism).
The final story in this collection Bats, Cats, and Wildlife work the angle of the crazy cat lady. Zetha is looking for some lost kittens which can be hard to find when you have 53 cats running around your dirty home as well as skunks and raccoons. But Zetha problem in this story comes from the hoard of bats nesting in her attic.
Overall this collection has been my favorite out of the three short story collections Lynn Thompson has written and I am looking forward to reading her novels.
Buy it here:
Kindle Edition: www.amazon.com
Also see: Blake by Lynn Thompson
forthenovellovers 
4 comments