Book Review – Hauntings

Hauntings by Ellen Datlow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to give this anthology a higher rating. Some of the stories included herein are really good, either excellent throughout or finishing strong after a slow start. Alas, the impressive stuff just has too much bad company, particularly tales that start off tedious and stay that way. I can tolerate a certain amount of obscurely poetic prose, and I can even cope with a measure of torture and death of pets and children as long as there’s some purpose to it. But when the underlying plot is odd or cliché rather than enlightening and engaging, the welcome gets worn out swiftly. I loved the cream but could barely stand the dregs. And though this isn’t a criticism of the book itself, I should note that the pagination was messed up on the Hoopla e-book edition. The errors made it hard to tell where one was at in the stories, which of course made the bad ones even harder to take.

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