Such a disturbing read! And that is high praise :) 4.5 stars!There are scary stories, then there are stories that are listed as horror because something supposedly scary happens, but never really is and then... There are those stories that are disturbing and horrifying even without being gory or necessarily scary.
Kelly manages to take an (almost) all-round look at what "horror" means - from the blood and gore, to the frightening things our minds can do all on their own and all the way around to the horror of losing someone dear to us or suddenly realising that we are stuck in a life we never wanted and detest, but somehow cannot seem to free ourselves from...
I must admit that when I first got to the "non-fiction" part of the book after having gone through even physical reactions (I was not able to finish my lunch while reading, which pretty much never happens) to the more bloody horror of the first parts of the book, I thought that Kelly had made a mistake in wanting to seemingly just publish all and any short story he'd written. The heartfelt story of a chess game seemed somehow out of place in the middle of all the horror... Until it dawned on me that it was exactly that: horror. Only this time in a more real-life and tangible sense - the kind of horror that each of us are likely to come across in our daily lives... Which made the book jump from being a good bunch of creepy stories, to being an amazing collection of horror stories.
Well done! I look forward to seeing what Kelly comes out with next :)