Horror.dk - Various

[goodreads]

Title: Horror.dk Author: Various Genre: Horror, short story Rating: 7/10 # pages: 253 Date read: August, 2008

Review: If you need inspiration for ghost-stories to tell on next year's camping trip - look no further. Horror.dk is all you could ask for and contains material enough for several evenings' worth of storytelling, and nightmare fodder for many nights.

Horror.dk is a new short-story collection with horror stories written by some of Denmark's very best genre authors. There is a huge variety in the stories with everything from ghost-stories as I knew them as a kid, through terrifying murder mysteries to psychological thrillers that leave everything to the reader's own hyperactive imagination. But one red thread runs through them all - they all contain an element of the supernatural.

It is almost impossible to pick a favourite story from the anthology, because they each have their highlights, so it really depends on what you're in the mood for here and now. Everybody know you can always count on Dennis Jürgensen to thrill, and The Night Train is no exception. Teddy Vork manages to create a creepy atmosphere without compare in Delila's Ringlets, the end of Stevie by Carina Evytt makes the reader cold to the very marrow of their bones, and if you read Executioner by Kenneth Bøgh Andersen after dark - it's on your own head. Still, I think it's the last short story in the book, Was is a great word by Bernhard Ribbeck I'll find myself returning to most often, because of the depth he manages to introduce to the main character in the just 30 pages the short story takes up.

Horror is a popular genre, but a genre that's difficult to do well. It takes a really talented author to write a good horror-novel as it's far too easy to either switch into 'gore' instead, or end up with a story so laden with surprise antics that the plot disappears completely. Fortunately the 12 authors of this anthology are all so familiar with the horror-genre that, that they manage to avoid both traps, and the reader is left with a thriller that it's impossible to put down.

Horror.dk is published in Denmark on September 1st, 2008 from Tellerup, and has yet to be translated to English.

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