Mulliga's Halloween Horrorfest 2014 - Midnight Paths

Here at Shangrila Towers, October means Halloween, and Halloween means horror...all month, I'll be putting up special horror-themed features. Today's post concerns an anthology of horror short stories available for purchase via the Kindle Store and for loan through the Kindle Owners' Lending Library:

Midnight Paths: A Collection of Dark Horror

There's no unifying theme to this medium-length collection of horror stories by Joe Hart, save for the fact that the protagonists all encounter some very bad luck. Whether it's something as simple as a stressful day at work ("The Exploding Man") or as exotic as a mysterious undead killer ("The Man in the Room"), every tale features characters who are pushed to their absolute limit - and beyond.

Hart has a number of works in the Kindle Store, and his writing is a notch above average. While his plots and characters aren't anything special (as the author acknowledges, the novella-length "Pale Man" is a riff on the Native-American-spirit-seeks-vengeance story), Hart manages to create some gruesome original monsters. My favorite stories are "The Unfamiliar" (a gimmicky-but-fun trek into a nightmare world) and the Lovecraftian "Adrift" (a likable sailor gets stranded in the middle of the Pacific - but he isn't alone).