Everyone Loves Clowns And Other Tales
My book - Everyone Loves Clowns And Other Tales - a collection of 6 short stories and one novella is finally out :panic:
You can get it on Amazon in either paperback or eBook, and I think for over 80,000 words and a bunch of artwork, it's a pretty damn good price - http://amzn.to/1pw9jGK
http://i819.photobucket.com/albums/z...psc49cb33d.jpg
But I've started this thread, to gather reviews and for any questions, discussions :)
If anyone would like to review the collection, let me know and I can send along a proof PDF!
I've got 2 reviews so far and I'm very happy!
From Amazon 4/5
I don't love clowns, I really don't, and this book really doesn't help change my mind. The title story of this book confirms all my fears of what clowns are really capable of, and Thomas Cranham story from the point of view of one small child's battle against Clueless the Clown made for a good read.
I do like this book a lot. I took it on a camping holiday and worked through each story through the week, nothing better than reading a short horror story before sleep!
Each story has its own flavour, often based around the Town of Matlock and it's surrounding areas, with the twist of horror, supernatural and lots of death!
I do like zombie tales, and A Bedtime Story and Oh To Be Alive are especially enjoyable reads, both from a time when Zombies have already made their impact on the world and certainly from differing points of view.
Try this book, you'll enjoy it, and looking forward to reading more of Thomas Cranham in the future.
From a reviewer on Cemetery Dance's forum - bugen
Everyone Loves Clowns and Other Tales – Thomas Cranham
“Because outside the walls the monster (no dragon but pain) had arrived and it struck the barrier with tooth and claw, fire and fist, and little Emily’s defender, her knight was nowhere to be seen.”
Consisting of six dark tales and novella, and written by one of this forum’s very own, this book runs a gamut of horror. Only two of the tales within would I classify as fair but enjoyable, while the remaining five serve to elevate the collection as a whole into a realm I did not expect when starting.
I would like to speak in some detail about the two top stories.
The book’s opener, ‘Oh To Be Alive’, deals with zombies. For me, this is generally a very bad thing. I have seen the zombie sub-genre butchered beyond what I would think of as reparable and have largely written it off in favor of other horror, a position I am now re-thinking. Told from the perspective of an intelligent zombie, we follow Henry Waterford as he navigates a landscape where the undead are born from death a few minutes later. This tale is not original, per se, but if you really want to embrace this critique you need to realize there are only thirty-six different types of stories anyway. No, it’s not original, but it has a voice, it tackles issues I haven’t seen properly dealt with in a zombie film since Romero’s first Dawn of the Dead, and evokes some of the prejudices shown more recently in District 9. A story that challenges our lifestyles, our outlooks and our discriminations, and has the power to spark debate. These types of stories get us thinking, and with enough of us thinking we just might make it out of life alive.
Most important is the final tale of the book. The title novella, ‘Everyone Loves Clowns’, is magic. Barely 5 years old, a girl’s life is in jeopardy battling cancer. An imaginative young Emily is nearly alone in her world of books, beholden to a teacher who resents Emily’s mental prowess, and largely ignored by her classmates until the circus comes to town. After attending Emily is convinced the clowns are eating her peers as she deteriorates from her illness. The author weaves a tale of fancy and horror detailing Emily’s perspective, and a heartrending relationship develops between Emily (the Princess) and her ridiculed classmate Jasper (the Knight) as the clowns, the other classmates, the teacher and the disease are battled. Stories like this are among the reasons I read in the first place.
Everyone Loves Clowns and Other Tales misses my top rating for a short story collection (4 stars) by less than 1/100th of a point, and I’ve had an internal struggle over what to do here. I have a tie-breaking backup system that informs the rounding process and has worked in the past, but in this case results in another tie. Because he is a new author, I’ve decided to spot him the .0071 points.
Well done, Mr. Cranham.
4 stars
