. . . And They All Lived Happily Ever After, by Crystal Connor
…And They All Lived Happily Ever After!By Crystal Connor
Genre: Horror/Sci~Fi/Dark Fantasy
Publication: Aug 14 2012
Once upon a time, in a dark & scary place, in a frightening land way too close to home…
Crystal Connor’s …And They All Lived Happily Ever After! is a collection of short fables not meant for children; but for those who enjoy the madness of nightmares.
In the ‘Queen’s Pawn’ you’ll visit a magical kingdom full of wonder and splendor only to come to the sickening realization that when the Queen had a message…she sends her pawns.
The perils of eating forbidden fruit have been cautioned against since the Book of Genesis, but will our urban princess in ‘The Apple’ heed those warnings?
Embark on a mystical and treacherous quest to reach ‘The Ruins’, located in place so sacred that is should never be visited by mortal man.
These are just a few of the adventures you’ll have as you explore the dark imagination of Crystal Connor. Fourteen short stories of horror, science fiction, and fantasy; 65,306 words of terror by a single author who clearly intends to one day be known as a Master in the genre.
Monsters, Women, and Villains (oh my)!
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Book Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivUo9ZU2B_4
Crystal’s Blog – http://www.wordsmithcrystalconnor.blogspot.com/
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Amazon Purchase Link: http://www.amazon.com/And-They-Lived-Happily-After/dp/1477616624/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380588479&sr=8-1&keywords=crystal+connor
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Author Bio
Washington State native Crystal Connor is a horrorpreneur who loves anything to do with monsters, bad guys, rogue scientific experiments, jewelry, sky-high high heel shoes and unreasonably priced hang bags.
Connor has been writing science fiction and horror since Jr. High school, has been published in various anthologies and is the author of the Spectrum Trilogy. Connor’s début novel, The Darkness, the first book in the Spectrum Trilogy was selected as a two time Award-Winning Finalist in the 2011 International Book Awards in the fiction categories of Cross Genre Fiction and Multicultural Fiction. Connor’s club affiliations include the Seattle Women’s Writing Group, Black Science Fiction Society and the Fictioneers.
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Review
Connor’s . . . And They All Lived Happily Ever After is a collection of dark and haunting retellings of fairy tales. As with most fairy-tale reboots, one of the things I liked best was figuring out how these tales connected to the more traditional versions of the stories. Connor does a great job of shifting voices and styles. For example, the letter from a princess–maybe a wicked stepsister?–to her mother the queen manages to elicit both horror and laughter because of Connor’s deft use of a teenage girl’s voice juxtaposed with the description of the atrocities committed by the princess in the queen’s name. Similarly, the internal memo from the Federal Vampire & Zombie Agency warning against the Santa Rosa Institute’s scientific experiments contrasts nicely with the newspaper puff piece about the Santa Rosa Institute, and both of them tie nicely to the scientific report about “Test subject 5047-788-A3″ who “sat up in bed after being dead for 11 days.”
In its exploration of form and content, the collection is interestingly postmodern–the sense of play in the stories is quite a lot of fun, eliciting shivers of delight and horror in most cases. There were a few moments that I thought could have been better developed–the end of “Thicker Than Water” could have used more narrative; I wanted to say “show, don’t tell!” And I didn’t like the handwritten table of contents, though I laughed when I read “It was a dark and stormy nite but she took her dumb ass outside anyway” at the bottom of the first page of the contents. Finally, the collection needed another pass for proofreading–I found the misuse of apostrophes distracting (as in “see’s” for “sees”).
I give the collection 3.5 stars; overall, the originality and fun make up for some of the problems!
