Carmilla Reads

Christina Escamilla writes great horror. If you haven’t encountered it before “64 Deaths” is a superlative read.

I was looking forward to this short guide book and read it with enthusiasm. However, my two main problems with it are that it is poorly edited, some sentences simply do not make any sense, and the lack of quoted examples. Escamilla does use examples to illustrate her points but because she can only comment on rather than reproducing the cited work, it loses its power. I understand that permission to quote current works might be difficult and expensive to obtain, but then why not use out of copyright horror and her own work to quote?

Apart from these two niggles there are some gems of good advice and I am sure it would be very useful to someone starting out. Certainly the publishing section is something I’m likely to refer back to. In summary it isn’t written for established writers, but it’s likely to be of use to new writers planning to write horror.