GregMO ROberts

The first thing I tell people when it comes to requests to read their work(s) is that…I don’t read. I can read. I just refuse not to. I have too many movies to watch and far too many porn sites to visit to spend my time with my nose buried in written pages trying to visualize what I wish would just be shown to me on TV.

To all you writers out there….I apologize. I can only imagine the effort that goes into getting your words together and finding a publisher and not having someone appreciate the fruits of your labor is (I can imagine) as disappointing as it is frustrating.

So when I was contacted by author Dan Dillard, I was polite and offered my efforts in an attempt to get through his book, but I hardly expected to finish it.

That is, until I started reading.

The book in reference is What Tangled Webs and is a series of stories from the author that brought us Demons and Other Inconveniences (another book I haven’t read). What Tangled Webs brings to the page eleven separate stories of horror including an 11 chapter novella titled, The Wager.

Most of the stories are short in length which was right up my non-reading-alley. But they were also descriptive easy reads that had me turning pages quicker than my quiet times in the closet with my friends Penthouse and Swank.

The stories were a good mix too and ranged from the terrifying to the bizarre. In Epi3Demic, a National link between murders and a particular movie have shockingly gruesome results. In Quid Pro Quo, we get individuals who will do anything for the health of a loved one only to find the price steeper than they expected. And in The ‘A’ Word, we read of a serial killer who mutilates a victim into a crab like creature for display. For the record, Epi3Demic was my personal fave.

I wasn’t completely as engrossed with The Wager as I was Deliver Us From Evil or Rite of Passage, but each story in Dillard’s collection was unique and carried with it a heavy dose of the macabre.

At just over 200 pages for the soft cover book, What Tangled Webs was an easy read. And for someone like myself that can only get through about one book every five or so years, the fact that I trudged through What Tangled Webs in just three days should indicate the quality and the excitement I had with each page turn.

I know little of the author outside of what is represented in the book’s final page, but I would be interested in reading what Dillard does next. And if that isn’t a recommendation, I don’t know what is.