Review of Patrick James Ryan’s “Blood Verse”

Blood Verse is Patrick James Ryan’s first published work and is an anthology of horror tales interspersed with poems.  Each poem follows the same format of rhyming couplets-there is no free verse poems in the mix.

As is usually the case with most anthologies, you reach into the goody bag and aren’t sure what you will get each time, especially when there is no set theme.  That is the case here.  Certainly, each tale has a horror bent to it, but they range from the supernatural to the more ‘regular’ every day type tales of serial killers and grim misfortune.  Kudos to the author for giving the reader a diverse set of shorts and poems with some unexpected and entertaining twists.

The good: the author does a solid job of backing up his stories with decent research that allows him to provide us with a book rich in diverse locales and plotlines.  It’s clear that effort was put forth to give each tale some heft and a solid background that makes them feel more real.  Though not every story has that ‘blink with surprise’ type ending that readers often expect, when they do happen here many were quite satisfying and enjoyable.  There are some genuinely entertaining stories on these pages that I enjoyed a great deal.  I know the term ‘fun’ is not always associated with horror, but I had fun reading them.

The challenging: I’m not going to say the ‘bad’ because that wouldn’t be fair to the author, because while some of the shorts found here didn’t resonate with me, they were still solidly crafted.  I could see the potential in most of them and I admire the author for putting together a very diverse compendium of tales and taking some risks here and there.  They just didn’t all hit the mark for me. One of the reasons is that there is a healthy dose of tell vs. show mixed into several of the stories.  It is a challenge all authors face-attempting to avoid making the yarn they are spinning feel more like a newspaper account of what is happening.  They instead want to give the reader a feeling of immersion, as if they are experiencing everything alongside the characters.  The author does accomplish that immersion in many cases, but in some instances it wasn’t there.  There were also some typos throughout, noticeable but not a major distraction.

While some stories just didn’t click for me (Pain and the Boxer, Desert Death, Hair as examples) others were very entertaining (Bus Stop, Road Rage Bigot, Walking the Dog, Elevator…among others) and that is what reading an anthology is all about: finding those gold nuggets that make reading a mix of different tales well worth the time, which Blood Verse succeeded in doing for me.  Chances are, if you are a horror fan, you will find a few solid nuggets in this book as well.

Blood Verse can be found here:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0988659034/ref=cm_cr_thx_view