Nightmare Asylum and other Deadly Delights – Author Sonia Kilvington
Review by Ernest Russell
Nightmare Asylum and Other Deadly Delights by Sonia Kilvington starts at the cover. Your eye is drawn ever deeper upon viewing the cover art by Craig Douglas. This book, like the fabled abyss, will stare back at you as Sonia Kilvington plumbs the essential nature of human relationships. For these stories are not uplifting, Chicken Soup for the Soul, no, these stories are much more Charles Addams style. You see, each of these stories strips away normal. To quote Charles Addams –“Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”
These are short stories at their finest, which are a different skill set than a novel. Novels have time to explore the full three-act structure. In a short story, you often only have space to write a segment of the three-act structure, usually a portion leading to a significant, transformative event for the main character.
Good short stories will have an impact. They strike you and stick with you. Weird tales and horror stories can kick your adrenaline and hours, maybe days later, they still rattle around inside your head. In this style, Sonia Kilvington is a master.
From the title story Nightmare Asylum to the final story Winter Baby, this book will enthrall you. They are fast reads. We need to remember horror does not lurk solely in darkness, seclusion, and gore. Innocence, passion, greed, and yes, even beauty, can bring their horror. Only the lucky ones get out of this through death. For the unlucky, shredding sanity as madness takes its toll.
If you ever watched Scooby-Doo, you should know this lesson. The real monsters are people. Stroll through the pages of Nightmare Asylum and Other Deadly Delights by Sonia Kilvington and meet the monsters. I wager you might even recognize a few.
You can find Nightmare Asylum and Other Deadly Delights by Sonia Kilvingston on Amazon. It is available in print and on Kindle.
Thank you for reading,
Ernest
When My Worlds Collide 