Animythical Tales

Sarah Totton
Animythical Tales

Fantastic Books, 2010

This is a pretty thin book (only 124 pages, very small print and that is inconvenient to read), so give it a short review.

It is difficult to call a general reason why I was quite disappointed after reading this book. Each time the problem of one story doesn’t become the problem of the next one, but there is another problem. «A Fish Story» and «Choke Point» are very well written stories, near the end of each of the stories you expect the unexpected culmination and denouement (if not, the story simply has nothing to show: he is too smooth, with the elusive plot), but they don’t show up. In «Flatrock Sunners», the story of a boy and his imaginary friends, there is all aspects to get an exemplary horror story about childhood, but the writer is too cold, overall temperature of the story goes below zero, and contact with reader gets lost.

Quite unexpected there is a story, with a sort of stylized British humor, about a man who wanted impress people, but did not know how. Jokes in «A Little Tea and Personal Magnetism» are mostly predictable, but they are all funny.
Best story in the book could be called «Bluecoat Jack». A very dark tale about loneliness and loss itself, where again the coldness in the description is admirable and add suspense, accompanied by a mystery.

Overall impression: it is a quite dull collection.