kingjason's review

Go to review page

3.0

If you want to know what HST is all about then you'll not go wrong starting with collection. It contains a huge amount of short stories submitted by many fine authors. Quite a few I have heard of and I have also read some of the short stories here.

The book fails in two areas for me, (HST stands for Horror Sleaze and Trash) Sleaze is covered and so is Trash, for some reason though Horror seems to have been forgotten, maybe it is down to that type of story not being submitted or maybe Arthur Graham finds all that stuff too scary and bins those submissions right away? The second area it fails is there aren't enough female writers, there is too much sex from the male point of view and I found in the middle of the book I started to get a bit bored as things started to feel a bit samey.

The stand out authors in this were Steven Eggleton, his story "Skywalker" was by far the most interesting story, such a talented author. Next up was Zoltan Komor, I have heard of the guy but not read any of his stories, they were brilliant, the guy seems to be quite insane. Porn-Fugitives was his best piece. Finally Ian Shearer gives the book a strong finish with his Story "Death By Committee" Jumping between the story and a discussion about the story was very clever. I plan to look into more of Zoltan and Ian's work.

I recommend this book if you wanna read about some crazy sick stuff....including a man who makes love to a shadow. (I know I only gave it 3 stars and that's because not all the stories are as good as the ones mentioned above)
More...