HELLMOUTH: A novella

Perfect blend of fantasy and horror. Terrifying that it's based on a real place.

Short horror story from central Bohemia during middle ages. It has thick atmosphere in the second half but I wish first half was paced faster. We get some basic info about the main character and his group of mercenaries. Some exposition is necessary but I just wanted to get to the good part while reading it.

Once the plot is set up the story finally starts to move and doesn't let up until the end. It feels like a cliché to say it but it had Berserk vibes. It's brutal at some places.

I do wish there was more at the end, though. It felt rushed, like one or two scenes were missing before the twist reveal. And after the twist is revealed there's a hard cut for the last paragraph which skips some time. I know what the author tried to do there but for me it was too abrupt. I didn't like it, you might. It's not the worst ending to a short story.

Author mentions that this was originally thought of as movie script and that something might be in the works. I hope so! This would work even better as atmospheric horror movie or a story in some horror anthology show. I don't think any exists, though... Lastly, I have to praise the author for getting the local names correctly including punctuation. Now that's rare!

TL;DR

Creepy and digusting in a good way, I really liked this book for how short it was. Kept me at the edge of my seat reading through it, all the places we go though and the depictions are pretty amazing and scary. I really liked the final part of the book, definitely it's strong point and since it's short you don't have to wait long to get to it. If you want a short creepy and scary story I would recommend you give this one a try. Check the price and see if you can get a discount at some stores becuase it is a fifty page book, I've seen some stores selling it for a pretty high price and at that point I think it's not worth it when you can get other horror books that have way more story than this one.

My Scoring System

I have five things I look for in a book, if the book checks all five it's a 5/5 stars book, if it checks none it's a 1/5 stars and everything else is a combination:

✓ - Main Story: I liked it, interesting, intriguing and terrifying.

X - Side Stories (if it applies):

X - Characters: Too many characters for such a short story, they're all pretty much a one line description but the banter between them was nice and enjoyable.

✓ - Setting/Ambiance: I really liked the setting, the dark forests of central Europe are nice.

✓ - Ending: Great ending, this was probably the best part of the book.

Extensive Review

Okay the problem with this book in my opinion is that there are like twelve characters, for a book of fifty pages I think that is pretty overkill. Right at the beginning you get bombarded with names and quick summaries of their character left and right. I get that our protagonist is a mercenary leader and has followers but maybe let's not spend time on each and every one of them when our story is fifty pages long. I don't know the process of writting short stories and it must be hard but if I had to pick something that I didn't like about this book it has to be the number of characters.

We spend too much time getting to know them a bit before we get to the good part right at the end. If the book spent it's entire time on the last part and just expanded on it I think it would have been better, but then again not knowing anything about the characters in your story makes it hard to care about them. Short stories are hard to write, overall this one succeeded and I enjoyed it very much.