Tag Archives: Bradley Somer

Evolve edited by Nancy Kilpatrick

Overview
Evolve

Title: Evolve
Author: Nancy Kilpatrick, Sandra Kasturi, Kelley Armstrong, Ronald Hore, Jennifer Greylyn, Mary E. Choo, Rebecca Bradley, Michael Skeet, Victoria Fisher, Kevin Cockle, Heather Clitheroe, Colleen Anderson, Sandra Wickham, Claude Bolduc, Claude Lalumiere, Rhea Rose, Gemma Files, Bev Vincent, Steve Vernon, Rio Youers, Bradley Somer, Natasha Beaulieu, Jerome Stueart, Kevin Nunn & Tanya Huff
In: Evolve (Nancy Kilpatrick)
Rating Out of 5: 3 (On the fence about this one)
My Bookshelves: Dark fantasy, Short story collections, Vampires
Dates read: 6th November 2018 – 1st April 2019
Pace: Slow
Format: Anthology
Publisher: Edge
Year: 2010
5th sentence, 74th page: You are never in a hurry.

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Synopsis

New Vampires have evolved, and they are coming for you! Kelly Armstrong, Tanya Huff and twenty-two other dark fantasy and horror writers come together to re-imagine the future of vampires in this new collection of all-original short fiction – one of the most unusual and original vampire anthologies ever assembled.

Thoughts

This wasn’t my favourite collection of short stories. Maybe I’m not all that much into vampire stories, maybe because these are just the type of vampire stories that I really love. The only two tales I really loved in this were by Kelley Armstrong and Tanya Huff. They weren’t necessarily bad tales, just not ones that I was completely enthralled by.

If you like the more traditional and darker aspect of vampires, I think that this is for you. Some of the stories were a little contemporary, but they weren’t that romanticised, humanised version that we all know and love in modern literature. Maybe if I had have read some of the vampire classics such as Dracula before this, I would have been a little more intently interested. But as things stand, I found this collection quite… meh. Not bad, not great. Definitely worth reading, but not one I’ll be rushing to reread anytime soon.

 <- The Slowing of the World ReviewLet the Night In Review ->
Image source: Goodreads

Bend to Beautiful by Bradley Somer

Overview
Evolve

Title: Bend to Beautiful
Author: Bradley Somer
In: Evolve (Nancy Kilpatrick)
Rating Out of 5: 3 (On the fence about this one)
My Bookshelves: Vampires
Dates read: 23rd March 2019
Pace: Slow
Format: Short story
Publisher: Edge
Year: 2010
5th sentence, 74th page: So trapped.

Buy The Book Now at The Book Depository, Free Delivery World Wide
Synopsis

He’s bought a tragically beautiful man home, but what they both get out of the interaction is far more than they had bargained for. It might be time to bend to beautiful.

Thoughts

When I started reading this story, I thought that it was just another tale of a vampire seducing someone and taking them home. It felt a little different because it was about two men, but it still kind of felt same, same. Until about halfway through.

Halfway through the tale, my perception started to change. I wondered if the narrator’s voice was really the predator, instead of the prey. And just who was hunting who. Which was kind of nice. It provided a little bit of something new to a pretty typical story.

Reading this short story was quite fun, it was just easy and simple. Slightly unexpected, but nothing that will haunt me in the future. Just simple, comfortable and kind of fun.

 <- Soulfinger ReviewEvolving Review ->
Image source: Goodreads