Happy Friday Folks!

Congrats on making it to the end of yet another workweek. Give yourselves a big pat on the back, you deserve it!

After finished The House in the Cerulean Sea, I wanted to sneak in a short story read before moving on to my buddy read with Iseult Murphy. so I looked up some freebies.

I settled on A Forest, or a Tree by Tegan Moore.

This is another TOR freebie dated back to last year. TOR is always great for their freebies, so if you’d like to check this out, simply click here.

I don’t believe I’ve ever read anything by Tegan Moore, so I just jumped in on this one.

Blurb

Four friends, May, Piper, Ailey, and Elizabeth, go on a camping trip. Things slowly begin to go wrong.

GoodReads

The Review

I give this short story three and a half stars!

I haven’t read too many scary camp stories, but it’s a niche in the horror genre I really love, so I had to check this out. I boosted this read with camp sounds and nighttime forest sounds to really get the ambience going.

I did enjoy this read despite some flaws that I couldn’t overlook during my experience.

Starting off positive, the characters.

The characters worked very well for me. These four girls are clearly in their early to mid twenties, and that shows in the writing. Aisley’s the nature expert, Piper the winey one, Elizabeth the perverted storyteller, and May the voice of reason.

May was my favorite as throughout the events of this story she stuck hard to her personality and never completely freaked. At first I did have minor trouble keeping up with who was who, but as the characters’ personalities shine through the dialogue it became much easier.

The concept and plot is what really drew me in. Like I said, I haven’t really read any scary camp stories, and I wanted to experience that. There’s definitely some strange stuff happening throughout this story, and though it wasn’t crazy intense for me, there was enough chill factor to keep me going. I was entertained.

I kept thinking what I would do in their situation. It was really creepy!

Where things fell apart for me was the ending. I mean, what the heck man? We got all this good buildup just for it to kind of fizzle out at the end. I was a little miffed at that. When you read a story, you want the end to justify you reading it, and there wasn’t much of a payoff here. If the ending was better, I probably would’ve at least rated a four.

In the end, this story was fun but could have been a bit better with the ending. I would definitely give this author another chance for future works, but I’m gonna be eyeballing that ending skeptically.

That’s A Wrap!

Well that’s it for this short story review. I hope you enjoyed it!

Have you read this story? Are there other short stories you’ve read that you simply have to gush about? Feel free to leave a comment. I’d love to start a conversation!

Have a great day!

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