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mxsallybend's review
3.0
"Purple Haze" is the first story of The End Is All We See, a Twilight Zone style sci-fi tale by M.F. Wahl that starts slow, gets weird, and ends with a whole lot of blood. Although it's ostensibly a sci-fi tale, I felt the genre's window dressing was the weakest aspect of the story. It's so light on detail, the spaceship crash could just as easily have been an international plane crash. Where that window dressing matters, however, is in the indigo-blue grass of an otherwise barren alien world. I can't say more without getting into spoiler territory, but the blood and the madness of the story's final pages are a gorgeous atrocity.
The second story in the collection, "Run For The Flame," is a vintage horror story from A.J. Brown that is reminiscent of Bachman-era Stephen King, before his ideas we co-opted and sanitized by the YA crowd. In an impossibly cold and barren future, young men and women are tasked with making a life-and-death run for a mythical flame, with bodies literally freezing in mid-step, littering the snow with bodies. I have never seen cold dealt with quite like this, and the amount of detail invested in its embrace is stunning.
Originally reviewed at Beauty in Ruins
The second story in the collection, "Run For The Flame," is a vintage horror story from A.J. Brown that is reminiscent of Bachman-era Stephen King, before his ideas we co-opted and sanitized by the YA crowd. In an impossibly cold and barren future, young men and women are tasked with making a life-and-death run for a mythical flame, with bodies literally freezing in mid-step, littering the snow with bodies. I have never seen cold dealt with quite like this, and the amount of detail invested in its embrace is stunning.
Originally reviewed at Beauty in Ruins
Disclaimer: I received a complimentary ARC of this title from the publisher in exchange for review consideration. This does not in any way affect the honesty or sincerity of my review.
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