Entertaining

Short fantasy stories, most with dark themes. Entertaining and interesting storylines. I liked all of the short stories. The narrator did a fantastic job with providing unique voices for each character and appropriate tone inflections for each scene. I received a free copy of this audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

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2 people found this helpful

‘Comfort is a distraction, happiness is a lie.’

Such a great collection of short stories. I wished every single one of them was longer and I’d quite happily listen to full length novels of them all.
Sometimes it was difficult to adjust to the next story after leaving a particularly great one, but that’s no great burden.
Greg does a brilliant job with narration. Can’t fault him at all; he is a brilliant storyteller and has some great voices for the characters.
I’m definitely looking forward to hearing more from Greg!
This is my honest opinion of a free review copy.

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3 people found this helpful

Wonderful Collection Of Stories

What Can I say. The stories are many and varied and not a bad one amongst them. The narration is top notch. I particularly enjoyed "The Darkness within the Light" by Shawn Speakman
about a wizard who extorts his way to the holy grail to get his revenge on god. I also enjoyed "Black Bargain" by Janny Wurts which features Dragons who want to end our world.
I was given a code for this book , whereby I promised to leave an honest and voluntary review on audible once read.

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2 people found this helpful

Expected a little more

I really like the concept for this anthology, so I jumped at the chance to review it. It did take me a little extra time due to unpredictable life events.

In any case my main issue with this anthology is that I felt like the characters sort of ran together between stories, maybe because it was audio, a short story collection, but only had one narrator. It made me sort of lose steam with this title because characters did not feel distinct enough. The narrator does do a range of voices but seemed to have one way to convey that a character might have an accent (and I wasn't sure if they all did or should?) It made the stories run together for me.

I received this audiobook in exchange for a fair review.

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1 person found this helpful

Different narrators would add a lot...

I really liked the first story, and felt the narrator was perfect for it.

However, after reading 2 more stories, I grew tired of the sameness of the narration. He didn't have the voice to keep me engaged for those other stories.

Perhaps the following stories would have been better with a different narrator, perhaps not, in any case, I dropped the book after the 3rd or 4th story as they were no longer interesting.

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1 person found this helpful

Misleading name

This is a collection of b-fiction where only the narrators performance barely saves it.

The stories are inconsistent, have a dumbed-down feeling to them with uninteresting protagonists who barely meets challenges or drama.

The name of this collection contains the word "evil" whereas the collection of stories themselves contain nothing that could even be mistaken for evil. This book is only a tiny peek into stories about (at worst) morally grey areas, without conflict or anything that would actually make the stories interesting or at the very least amusing.

If you love vampire romance for tweens then this is for you.

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Not very convincing

Some stories are better than others. Some stick to the theme, others less so. I enjoyed Frohock, Schafer and Mazarkis Williams. They were the best and most enjoyable in my opinion. I tried all of the other stories as well but did not finish some of them. Of course with a collection of stories by different authors it's normal to expect some differences in skill.

Also the narration is an issue. Greg Patmore has a distinct slur and hiss to his voice which initially drew me in when I listened to the sample. In fact, at times it fits greatly with, for example, the first story as well as a few of the others. Which also shows that Greg is able to produce a high quality narration. But on the whole I found that his performance unfortunately varied too little between these different stories and characters. Even when spreading out my listening sessions to one-story-a-day, this was something that bothered me a lot. Which is dissapointing: some stories could have had more impact if the narration had been better.

Most likely an antology is a more difficult project to produce, because it challenges both narrator and reader due to the many changes in setting and characters. But that only serves to raise the question why a single, perhaps less versatile narrator was chosen for this project. Why not have multiple narrators work on it?

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