I've read three of these stories and with nine left to go, I read the first one today that gave me chills. Today I spotlight Amanda Banker's Dead Water.
It was spooky!
Now, this isn't to say that the first two stories I've reviewed weren't spooky--they were, but this author spent a lot of time setting up one scene in particular which made the experience creepy and very cool.
Dead Water focuses on two brothers as they journey from Chicago to lands up north. They're trying to find a retreat in Wisconsin, but a beater pickup truck strands them in the night. With no cell service, they're forced to use a road map from 1984 to help guide them. The map becomes the least of their worries.
The brothers--one wounded in an attack while a soldier in Iraq--make their way to what appears to be a deserted town on the shores of an immense lake. With more questions than answers the pair find themselves involved in ghosts, disasters and long-lost vendettas.
What I love about short stories is how, in a short period of time, you can enter a world, come to know the characters and their struggles and see how the conflict is resolved. Good short stories do this very well. This author I can include in that number. She spends time setting the scene so that, even though there's less action going on in this story as happened in the other two, it feels just a full, just as complete as its sibling stories.
If you're interested, check out Beyond the Wail at Amazon or Xchyler Publishing's website: HERE. You won't be disappointed.
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