Today is my stop on the book tour for The Captivating Flames of Madness by Jeff Parsons book tour by Blackthorn Books Tours. This book is a collection of short stories that all delves into the weird and horrifying aspects of everyday life.
Rating: 4.5/5 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Genre(s): Horror, General Fiction, Thriller
Page count: 298
Publication date: 2nd April 2018
Trigger warnings: death, abuse, violence, addiction, drug abuse, murder
Summary: This book’s title comes from the reality that – like a moth to the flame – we’re all just one event, mishap, or decision away from things that could change our lives forever.
What would you do if fate led you astray into a grim world where you encountered vengeful ghosts, homicidal maniacs, ancient gods, apocalyptic nightmares, dark magic, deadly space aliens, and more?
If you dare, why not find out?
Read for yourself the twenty-two gloriously provocative tales that dwell within this book – but be warned, some of my dear readers have experienced lasting nightmares…
My Review
I received a copy of this book from Blackthorn Book Tours for free read and review as part of this Book Tour
One thing that I love about collections of short stories is that you get varying stories of genres and characters. And I really enjoyed reading this collection of short stories. I loved the variety of stories that captivated my imagination.
Each of these stories were amazing to read, with varying degrees of tension and shock that made my spine tingle. There were some that I felt were somewhat predictable until the page or paragraph of that story. I thought that it was really clever that many of the stories made you think that the story was headed in one direction but then went seamlessly into another. Or a character turned out to be completely different to how they were first introduced. These twists made me enjoy these stories even more because it just changed the whole narrative. Sometimes in only a few word or a sentence. Which I thought was so clever and well done.
I loved how so many of the stories in this collection were essentially very simple. As the revolved either a very small group of characters, a single character, a small series of events or even just one. Some of them were set over longer periods of time, such as a number of weeks, whereas other were much shorter, some appeared to be set under or around only a few hours long. I really loved how the stories centred around supernatural elements, everyday horrors and science fiction. It made these short stories so enjoyable and made them feel very believable as so many of them where rooted in reality that had been altered and filtered through fear.
There were some stories that I didn’t enjoy as much, but that is kind of to be expected with collections of short stories, not all of them are going to be 100% to your tastes. I liked so many of the stories that I can’t pinpoint a favourite, but here are a few of the ones that I can’t get out of my head The New Order, Control, Witches’ Hill.
I would really recommend reading The Captivating Flames of Madness. Especially if you like reading spooky kind of creepy stories, or if you’re still the mood for reading more spooky books right after Halloween, then I think that you’ll really enjoy this book.
Author Information
Jeff Parsons
On Jeff:
Bio:
Jeff has a long history of technical writing, which oddly enough, often reads like pure fiction. He is well-known for being unnoticed in the literary field. In addition to his two books, The Captivating Flames of Madness and Algorithm of Nightmares, he is published in SNM Horror Magazine, Bonded by Blood IV/ V, The Horror Zine, Dark Gothic Resurrected Magazine, Chilling Ghost Short Stories, Dystopia Utopia Short Stories, Wax & Wane: A Coven of Witch Tales, Thinking Through Our Fingers, The Moving Finger Writes, Golden Prose & Poetry, Our Dance With Words, The Voices Within, Fireburst – The Inner Circle Writers’ Group Second Flash Fiction Anthology 2018, and Year’s Best Hardcore Horror Volume 4. For more propaganda, visit his author page at https://www.facebook.com/OfficialJeffParsons/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel.
Some links:
Lastly, I would like to say a big thank you to Henry at Blackthorn Book Tours for reaching out to me and asking me to be a part of book tour.
If you would like to to know about any of there up coming book tours you can go here to there website or by clicking on the image below.
Sarah's Book Life 
I’m like you – Control and New Order have just stayed in my head long after finishing reading them. Both unsettling in two different ways.
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