The Void is a collection of fifteen creepy short stories by Chad Miller. I received a copy from the author for my honest review.
The Void Review
It’s often difficult to judge a collection as a whole because each story will be different, appealing to a different readership, so I will first describe each story separately.
This book contains the following short stories/ flash fiction pieces:
Descent: a dark and very bleak tale about the long-term effect of abuse and its consequences.
The Helpless: A man trapped in a coma hears everything his greedy relatives think about him.
Always There: A harrowing ghost story involving the horrors of the Holocaust.
Nightmare at the Pharmacy: A short and darkly funny story featuring a lot of toilet-based humour.
DNR: An Artificial Intelligence contemplates a future without its creator.
Survivor: A divorced man’s life hangs in the balance – literally.
The Proletariat: A man’s arrested for something, but he doesn’t know what.
A Sick Sense of Humor (Living the American Dream): A wage-slave looks forward to retirement after years and years of tedious work.
Lady Davignon: A flash piece inspired by Lady D’arbanville by Cat Stevens/ Yusaf Islam.
The Beast Awakens: A young girl lives in an abusive home with her beastly mother.
Tall Tale: A True Story: Another toilet-based humour story about a man with a strange bowel problem.
Sanctuary: A vignette about love.
Guilty Pleasure: A man must clean his knife because it has become horribly stained …
The Nick: A little historical tale – a guillotine pleasure.
To Death with Irony: A flash story about death and the afterlife.
There’s a lot of variety in this collection. The ones I liked best are where the author uses his personal knowledge to good effect. Chad Miller is a trained pharmacist – so the medical details in Nightmare at the Pharmacy ring true. It was darkly funny in places, too.
I also enjoyed Guilty Pleasure for its twist ending.
Always There, a harrowing tale of the evils of the Holocaust, was a heartfelt story that showed the grim reality of the concentration camps. One of the author’s relatives was a survivor of the atrocities, so that story had great details and compassion for the victims. It’s longer than most of the stories and has more depth because of it.
Some of these stories are very dark, involving such themes as abuse, suicide and drug addiction. There’s one that is a Kafta-esque nightmare. Another makes me glad to have had a happy childhood.
Personally, I prefer when the author’s displays his macabre sense of humour, like in DNR, or when he focuses on the relationships between characters, like in A Sick Sense of Humor.
All are well-written, even if the subject matter is not to your taste.
If you like a quick dose of darkness, you might like reading Chad Miller’s The Void.
About the author: Chad Miller has a B.A in psychology from Syracuse University and a Pharm D. from the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. He lives in Delaware with his girlfriend Natasha, her daughter Sasha, and his three children, Killian, Willow, and, Halina. His novel, The Prisoner of Fear will debut this fall. For other published works and information check out his website here.
You can find his book The Void on Goodreads and Amazon US / Amazon UK
Share this:
mybookspage 