Alien Horrors

De: Tim Curran

Narrado por: Rob Saladino

In the deepest, darkest depths of space, the stars are cold, malevolent eyes looking across a vast graveyard of the unknown, the unnameable, and the undead. Here the planets are tombs and the moons haunted catacombs. And here are extraterrestrial nightmares beyond imagining. There is no benevolent first contact. No utopian worlds. Only alien horrors.

Some of the stories included in Alien Horrors:

"Flypaper" – An expeditionary team is trapped inside an alien machine that offers them anything they want at a terrible price.

"City of Frozen Shadows" – The last living man on Earth hides in a gutted city, hunted by alien exterminators.

"The Black Ocean" – Astronauts adrift in a misty alien ocean are attacked by a gigantic predator.

"Charnel World" – Mercenaries track the most lethal life form in the galaxy in the green hell of the planet Xenos.

"Migration" – A mining camp is directly in the path of a migrating alien hive.

"Stowaway" – The crew of a starship is stalked by a shapeshifting alien bloodsucker.

©2022 Tim Curran (P)2023 Weird House Press

No happy endings. :)

I enjoyed each story for the fact that none were the same, except they occurred in some distant planet far away from earth. I enjoyed the narration as the voices were not perfect; they were unique to each character.

Excellent sci-fi horrid

This was excellent! What a blast. This is one of my favorite sci-fi horror collections. Every single story satisfied me. Of Course, I have a few favorites: Black Ocean, Fly Paper, Heat seeker, Ghost ship and Stowaway.

“Alien Horrors”, by Tim Curran was a fantastic collection of stories. It showed the spectrum of his writing. The stories had different monsters and atmospheres, A great collection for any sci-fi horror fan.

If you love bad writing and terrible audio performance this book is for you!

I’m going to have to stop listening to this at the third story. The narrator has now mispronounced enough words for this to become comic. I can’t tell if this is some prank on the listener or not. Instead of gluttony the narrator said gluteny. In an earlier section of the same story, Fly Paper a character having a violent seizure from poison, is described as flailing in a “colonic” manner instead of…. cyclonic I’m guessing? That’s a tough one because I could see this cut rate, real life Garth Marenghi actually using “colonic” to heighten the horror. Hate to bash the narrator when the writing is the real problem here but it’s the comic icing on the garbage cake that forced me to write this. I have to say the temptation to continue these stories is strong though. It has the same feeling as not being able to turn away from watching Tommy Wiseau’s crapterpiece “The Room”! I’m curious to see if the same paper thin characters are going to show up and stupidly argue in every story. They certainly populate the first three. Will they argue in a slight variation on Michael Crichton’s Sphere, like in Fly Paper? Who knows what next first draft of a story Tim Curran will dazzle with next? This author is not good and not worth your time and money. I’m so suspicious of the good reviews being an astroturfing campaign at this point. who are these Tim Curran fans? Are they real people? Friends and family? I’m going to try and get my credit back from Audible only because I feel like I’ve been scammed. I would also add though that I don’t think Mr Curran should stop writing and creating. I just don’t like being lied to about the quality.

Awful Narrator and Okay Writing

I'm not normally one to leave reviews, but this is just rough. The writing isn't awful, maybe a bit derivative (though I suspect that may be intentional at times), sometimes a bit awkward or cringy, but I've certainly read worse. The characters are all pretty much the same stereotypes in every story. Maybe Curran was a tradesman before he became an author, I don't know.

The Narrator, however, is the worst I've ever listened to. He's a terrible choice for the characters, most of whom are grizzled workman types. I'd imagine most of them low pitched and with the kind of gravel you get in your voice from 3 packs a day while breathing in concrete dust. Including the women. But Saladino sounds sort of squeaky at the best of times, and still finds the need to speak in a falsetto when voicing women, which is absolutely never the correct way to do it. On top of this, he voices the intense parts of the stories like a nine-year-old boy shining a flashlight at his chin in the basement telling ghost stories. Then, to make matters worse, he mispronounces words quite frequently. Envelope is pronounced like the thing you put a letter in when its supposed to be the verb "to surround". Gluteny instead of gluttony. That sort of thing. And there is no nuance in his reading. The banter between crewmates (which is admittedly far too common) comes across as serious even when that probably wasn't the author's intention. Doubly bad when most of it is an HR wet-dream, so instead of a man and a woman tossing back and forth some sarcastic but friendly bickering about dick sizes and showing each other a good time, you get straight up sexual harassment and creepy men.

So I really can't suggest this audio book. Maybe the physical book is worth a shot, but the narrator in this is so bad it obscures the author's intent and makes him come across as incompetent instead of at least average.