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A review by whatyoutolkienabout
Ghostwritten by Ronald Malfi
4.0
I firstly want to thank Titan Book and Netgalley for sending me an E-Arc this book to review. My review is left voluntarily and is completely honest.
After recently reading an ARC of Black Mouth by Malfi I was interested to see what their novellas would be like. Ghostwritten is an interesting collection of four short stories tied together by a single thread. While the style is a bit of a change from previous novels we still get Malfi’s mastery of the uncanny and chilling. I personally preferred the third novella in this collection since I felt there was more to connect with.
The only issue I really had with this one, which lowered the rating to four stars is the characters do not really stand out to me, apart from in the third novella as mentioned. I just couldn’t really get invested enough to actually care or worry if they would survive the chilling tale. Of course being shorter in length there is not lots of space or time for character building but for me it just made it a tad less worrying since I honestly wasn’t that bothered if they lived or died. That might say more about me as a reader and horror fan than Malfi’s writing. What I will say though is we do have an interesting cross section of characters from literary agents to mob underlings.
I did enjoy the idea of the horror coming from the written word. Malfi’s horror is something I am enjoying and I can see them becoming a staple in the genre in the future. Definitely a good chilling read for spooky season.
After recently reading an ARC of Black Mouth by Malfi I was interested to see what their novellas would be like. Ghostwritten is an interesting collection of four short stories tied together by a single thread. While the style is a bit of a change from previous novels we still get Malfi’s mastery of the uncanny and chilling. I personally preferred the third novella in this collection since I felt there was more to connect with.
The only issue I really had with this one, which lowered the rating to four stars is the characters do not really stand out to me, apart from in the third novella as mentioned. I just couldn’t really get invested enough to actually care or worry if they would survive the chilling tale. Of course being shorter in length there is not lots of space or time for character building but for me it just made it a tad less worrying since I honestly wasn’t that bothered if they lived or died. That might say more about me as a reader and horror fan than Malfi’s writing. What I will say though is we do have an interesting cross section of characters from literary agents to mob underlings.
I did enjoy the idea of the horror coming from the written word. Malfi’s horror is something I am enjoying and I can see them becoming a staple in the genre in the future. Definitely a good chilling read for spooky season.