A Glow of Candles and Other Stories

By: Charles L. Grant

Narrated by: Samuel E. Hoke

Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins

Publisher's Summary

So, you think you like to be scared.... 

Nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, and the coveted Nebula, the unforgettable tales in this magnificent collection are the work of one of today's most respected masters of horror. Here are stories designed to carry the listener across fear's threshold, to terror...and beyond. 

©1981 Kathryn Ptacek (P)2021 David N. Wilson

Meh.

I obviously don’t understand what horror is if these stories are considered horror. I mean, I thought something scary but with that something extra. I didn’t find any of these stories scary, much less in the horror category.

I liked the narrator’s voice but I’m not sure it’s right for narrating. It’s just too low, especially when I personally think a requirement for narrating (if you want to make a living doing this and be known as a great narrator) is to be able to do a variety of voices. In this case, he can do low and really low. So there were characters (adult females and kids) in which I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn’t a man speaking. There were times when the last word of a sentence was cut off/cut in half. I’m guessing he prefers to read a line or two, then pause it, just in case there’s a mess-up and he isn’t left having to re-narrate a long passage. Some of the pauses between chapters were too long, in my opinion, or oftentimes way too short to where I didn’t even realize the next story/next chapter had started.

Questions/Comments:

A Crowd of Shadows 2/5
I didn't understand why the MC wanted to kill the kid when he found out the parents had been the robots or whatever and not him. And I swear whenever "the kid" was mentioned, it was vague. So when it was revealed, "the kid" was actually eighteen years old, yeah... my whole image of him changed because he was actually an adult.

Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abby Rose 2/5
I didn’t understand what was going on in this story besides when the drunk guys show up and are looking for Grace, and Nell tells them basically to go away. Then Grace ends up killed. What was the beginning of the story about? What did the magical aspect have to do with this story?

Temperature Days on Hawthorne Street
?

Come Dance with Me On My Pony’s Grave
5/5

The Three of Tens 3/5
This was an interesting story. I didn’t get the little riddle thing at the end though.

The Dark of Legends 1/5
The story was boring. For a majority of publishers to go out of business at the same time, I guess
I wasn’t really understanding how the world worked. I wasn’t a fan of the one-sided interview at the end either.

Caesar, Now Be Still 1/5
This story was boring.

White Wolf Calling 1/5
I thought this was a bland werewolf story. It might as well have just been a regular wolf/no transformation story. It didn’t have that magical quality werewolves have.

The Rest is Silence 3/5
This was an interesting story but I felt a little lost with the ending.

When All the Children Call My Name 1/5
This story annoyed me because kids are dying at the playground but there was never any talk of the police doing anything about it. Or when the MC found out parents thought he was the one killing them, even though one died before he even got back, and he had no motive to do it. It didn’t make sense. It was obvious when the little kids were first introduced that they were the killers of the older boys, yet how did the MC figure that out? It was like he went from talking to the one teenage boy who told him the little kids were the culprit and the MC kept telling him to go away because he was making stuff up, then suddenly the MC was acting as though he’d known it was the little kids the whole time.

Secrets of the Heart 1/5
“My parents told me never to let anyone in the house,” but they never told her to open the door in the first place? The adults didn’t find that strange? I found it interesting that the author said something about how he had the idea for this story but it took him a long while to get the story together. I was expecting something that hadn’t already been written. I automatically thought of the one Alfred Hitchcock episode with the little boy who could make anything happen and his parents and neighbors were terrified of him. There was nothing original here.

A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn’s Eye 1/5
Again, I found this one boring.

Reminds me of Stephen King short stories

I was looking for something creepy but not “extreme” and this fit the bill nicely. Great writing, great narration. I highly recommend it.

Not a typical horror novel

In listening to this book, I was reminded a lot of early Stephen King, in that the horror isn't in your face, but more a slowly building dread in a world you can't quite understand. A few of the stories were written in a not too distant future and really seemed to focus on what humanity, as a whole, lost. Written from the viewpoint of the outliers in this society, I couldn't decide on whether it was a commentary on where the literary genre has progressed to. If you are looking for gory action packed situations where [insert monster or creature of choice] attacks, this isn't it. If you are looking for stories that make you think, allowing your mind to fill in the blanks, then you might find this book enjoyable. The narrator's voice had a deep gravelly voice that worked in some of the stories, and not so well in others.

*this book was given to me for free at my request and I provided this voluntary review*