Strange People, Scary People
By Tally Harbour
ISBN # 9781611873665 
Author’s Website:  http://tallyharbour.com/ 

Brought to you by OBS reviewer Lindsay

Horror is without a doubt my favorite genre and I love reading horror books.  Yes, even more than vampires, werewolves, and shifters.  Hard to believe, I know, but its true.  So, needless to say, I jumped at the chance to review Strange People, Scary People.  This book is actually a collection of 14 short stories that all center around, yep you guessed it, strange and/or scary people.  The book contains a variety of short stories from angry wives to mutant armadillos.  I won’t go through every story in the book but I will highlight a few I liked the best.  Glendy with the Iron Teeth is a story about a group of boys who discover that the town’s recluse may be everything she is rumored to be, and more.  Cousin Pete’s Armadillo Farm is a story about a farmer who creates mutant armadillos and orders them to attack people.  Rebecca’s Hand (this one is my favorite, read it, you will understand why) is a story of a scorned wife’s revenge.  Out of the Plexiades is about a demon that is summoned back to Earth to wreak havoc on mankind. There are also other stories about a girl with cooties who seeks revenge on her classmates, a young woman who uses magic to bring back her male obsession from the dead and a story about a man who is deathly afraid of pine trees.  There is definitely something for everyone here.

The only story I didn’t care for is the last story, She of the Other Kingdom.  I believe this story is about romantic obsession and rejection.   I found the ending didn’t make a lot of sense to me.  In Harbour’s defence, it’s not badly written, I think I just expected the story to end differently.  I actually expected Timothy to smash his car into the tree at the end of the story.  It’s not a bad story, it just left me confused.  As I mentioned above, my favorite story is Rebecca’s Hand.  It is a simple story of how a scorned wife gets her revenge with a whole lot of creepy thrown in for good measure.  This story actually made me chuckle at the end.  Not because of what happened but because of how Rebecca, the scorned wife, was able to effectively gain the upper hand on her husband using her actual hand.

Whenever I read any horror book, I always look for what I like to call the Creepy Factor.  Simply put, that is the creepy feeling you sometimes get when you read something scary.  In my opinion, the more the creepy factor, the better the horror book.  Strange People, Scary People is loaded with the creepy factor.  Many of these stories will give you that weird uneasy feeling when you finish them.  All 14 stories are well written with surprisingly effective character development for short stories.  This is also a very well edited book with only one or two mistakes in its entire 115 pages.  Which I believe is something to acknowledge for an Indie book.  If you are an avid horror fan and like the creepy factor, you will enjoy reading these stories.  And don’t worry, there is mild violence and very minimal blood, guts and gore in the book so it is suitable for any adult horror fan.  So, I imagine you are wondering why only 4 stars instead of 5.  Well, I just felt that 2 of the stories really didn’t stand up to the others.  As previously stated, the ending to the final story in the book, She of the Other Kingdom, just wasn’t clear to me and Pumpandump Versus Pitchinditch just didn’t seem to fit in with the horror of the other books.  The story was good, I just don’t think it fits in with the remaining stories in the book as it wasn’t scary at all.  However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read the book.  If you like horror, I recommend you pick up a copy of this book.  Strange People, Scary People contains a mix of stories that will certainly please almost all horror fans and it is a quick read that will leave you with an uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach.