Review of Patrick Rutigliano’s “Black Corners Of A Blood-Red Room”

Black Corners of a Blood-Red Room is a series of brief vignettes, or nightmares, if you will.  Each is like a taste of a bitter drink that first warms, then burns, as it travels down your throat, and then is gone, though you can still feel it there, itching in your gut, well after you have finished it.  None of these slightly less than fifty tales is more than ten pages long, and most are quite a bit less than that.  That the author is able to do much like the creature that adorns the cover and grab you by the throat with the stories that appear here speaks highly of his writing talent.  Short fiction can be tricky, and admittedly, not every single story here resonated with me, but again, with a selection as wide as Mr. Rutigliano has offered up here, his hit rate is quite impressive.
The stories on these pages are broken up into five different themes, though the author’s flights of fancy don’t really provide enough restraint that all of these stories can be easily categorized, though they are all horror, and there is a tremendous amount of diversity at work here.  Not often do you see a writer willing to plunge into such diverse territory.  We travel through history, alternate universes, and surreal environments.  This is definitely a dreamscape, and a wide ranging one at that.
I would like to see some longer tales from this author, but my guess is that he often gets the itch to create something short and abrupt, and finds it hard to spend time on larger works.  Again, he has done a great job at creating short, strong splashes of imagery that pulls you in and then drop kicks you rather rapidly when the tale is done.  So if you have a penchant for short horror fiction that tends to run into the fantastical, you should check out this book.  It is well worth the price of admission.

Black Corners of a Blood-Red Room can be found here:  http://www.amazon.com/Black-Corners-Blood-Red-Patrick-Rutigliano/dp/1453756531/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294715754&sr=1-1