Book Review Of Scaring The Crows:21 Tales For Noon or Midnight by Gregory Miller
Scaring The Crows:21 Tales For Noon or Midnight
By Gregory Miller
StoneGarden.Net Publishing
$7.95
This small book accorded me one of the most pleasant reading experiences of the last year or so. And don’t think I’m damning it with faint praise using the word “pleasant.” I’m not; I really liked this book. All parts of it, from its delightful front cover to the blurbs on the back. I’ve enjoyed it from the moment I took it out of the shipping envelope. I own an e-reader and I’d forgotten how pleasing the sight and feel of a real book can be!
I don’t know if it is a tribute to Mr. Miller’s skills or those of his publisher, but it was doubly pleasant to come across a book with so few (I couldn’t find any) misspellings or typographical errors. Good proofreaders do still exist.
After babbling about the books foundation I want to quickly allay any angst the author may be suffering while awaiting my opinion. Although, after receiving favorable notice from so giant a figure as Ray Bradbury: “Gregory Miller is a fresh new talent with a great future.” (the quotation is found on the front cover directly above the title), I can’t imagine author Miller is on pins and needles waiting for this pigmy’s appraisal. All I can do is agree with the great man: Gregory Miller does indeed have talent!
The title of the book leads us to believe it is all ghost and horror stories; one look at the whimsical but controlled cover illustrations, however, immediately informs us that it contains elements bound to be more complicated than that. Dark yes, but varied enough to keep us interested; some stories are indeed ghostly, others poignant; yet others almost comedic. But dark; dark is still the operative word here.
For instance, in “Scaring The Crows,” the first short story as well as the title of the book, the tortured heroine’s self perpetuated problems would be downright amusing if they weren’t so obviously painful and likely to be fatal. About half-way though the book another story, “Lorna Gould’s Roses” has some funny lines too, but the protagonist’s situation is deadly serious. My favorite story, found near the end of the book, “A Sense of Duty,” is perhaps the darkest of the lot and yet somehow manages to be life-affirming. If you’ve ever tried to write fiction you’re aware of the difficulty inherent in expressing such dichotomies in print, but Miller does a masterful job.
All Miller’s well-drawn characters are ordinary people caught in situations where the rules don’t fit the game they thought they were playing; there’s nary a Hannibal Lecter in the bunch. We can all relate. (Well, Ok, there’s at least one flesh eater and three or four zombies; but the flesh eater wasn’t looking for trouble and the zombies are ordinary guys in a zombie sort of way.) Miller has an excellent ear for dialogue; there’s just a trace of dialect here and there for the sake of back-country verisimilitude, nothing to jar us out of Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.”
Miller specializes in abrupt endings. For the most part he’s quite good at it. My one criticism (and I suspect he’s heard this before) is that occasionally the ending is all too abrupt. In “Goodbye Friend” for instance, one of the more poignant stories (Hey! We’re talking a boy and his dog here!), I don’t know how it ends. I mean, was it the lady or the tiger? Life or death?
Did I mention that I liked this book? I found it well written, well bound, well illustrated and yes, well proofread. One of the best new books for under ten bucks I’ve read in a long time. Find this book at www.Stonegarden.net publishers.
Mike Nardine writes free book reviews at www.YourBookReview.Com. Got a book you want reviewed?
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