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Voyeurs of Death

par Shaun Jeffrey

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In the macabre world of Shaun Jeffrey, things are not always what they seem. A young boy 'fixes' dead things. A fairy tale has a far from happy ending. Clothes bring out the best -- and worst -- in the wearer. True love mutates into hatred and violence. Heroes become villains in the blink of an eye. Scenic vacation spots hide ancient evils. And a date at a secluded parking spot produces dire consequences. Voyeurs of Death delivers 15 tales of the macabre and surreal. Take a look inside ... if you dare.… (plus d'informations)
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3 sur 3
I really enjoyed this collection but just couldn't get above 3 stars. There are a number of really good stories and no real stinkers and some real novel ideas in the plotting of some of the stories. I guess what holds me back is there really are few higher level things going on, nothing that makes you particularly thoughtful about any of the stories. Still, there's something to be said for a good tale well told.

Once again gr is effed up for this book in the database. On a good not though, if you click outside the review box by accident it finally asks you if you really want to discard the review. ( )
  Gumbywan | Jun 24, 2022 |
‘Voyeurs Of Death’ is a single-author collection by Shaun Jeffrey from 2007 featuring very short stories, most of which have appeared previously in some other horror magazine or anthologies. This means that some editor paid good money for them and was confident they would please the punters which is the best recommendation you can get. Four of the stories are previously unpublished but, in all honesty, you would never guess which if he didn’t tell you. After a one-sentence summary of each tale, cunningly including the title, I will give you my overall impression.

Ethan Cullen and his colleagues want to set up a holiday resort on the Scottish isle of Inchcullen but ‘The Flibbertigibbet’ has other plans.

‘The Watchers’ are people who want to see Luke and his new girlfriend, Geraldine, have sex in their car which might be fun.

A ‘Paranoid’ woman wakes up in what seems to be a hospital but the windows are barred, her head is shaved and the doctors don’t have a reassuring bedside manner.

‘The Tunnel’ is a drain leading towards a haunted house where peer pressure ruined a man’s life several years ago and now he’s back to try to fix things.

‘The Quilters Of Thurmond’ sew lovely quilts and give them to the young people of the village when they go off to the mainland to protect them.

‘Sin Eater’ comes around to your house and listens to your family as they confess their sinful thoughts and deeds, no matter how embarrassing.

‘Voyeurs Of Death’ gather at a car crash to look at the victim which reminds me of an old Ray Bradbury story but this took a different turn.

It should be all part of the normal ‘Life Cycle’ when Frances Hulme, a desperate whore and junkie gets pregnant, presumably by one of her customers, but she gives birth to something very strange.

Things go ‘Dark Inside’ a cruise ship when they rescue a lone boat on the ocean and it’s full of rats that carry a deadly virus.

Deaf Alex uses his mechanical skills to make a dead cat go like ‘Clockwork’ but it works better than expected.

A ‘Venetian Kiss’ might be a bite from one of that city’s mosquitoes or it might be something more deadly, especially at carnival time when the mask can conceal anything.

The ‘Peacock Lawn’ belongs to a rich man who wants to build a shopping centre on a swamp but soldiers who died in battle there might have other plans.

‘Envy’ is what struggling b-movie actress hopes to promote in her colleagues by getting a very special dress to wear to the premiere and she succeeds beyond her wildest nightmares.

Simon Wagner wants to make wife Deon into a ‘Snake Charmer’, charming the snakes inside other men’s trousers to enhance their sex life but things don’t work out as planned in this erotic horror.

‘Park Life’ is flash fiction with a family at a zoo and a nice little twist at the end.

It’s all good and some of it is very good indeed. This is mostly because Shaun Jeffrey not only gets the basics right but also adds and ruffles and flourishes like similes, metaphors and wit. Getting the basics right gives him a sound footing for the rest. The basics are:-

1) Naming your characters and describing, preferably with some style, their physical characteristics.

2) Having a solid sense of place, the setting for the story, again with some description to bring a sense of mood or danger or enchantment.

3) Making the reader care a little bit, given the limited page count, what happens to the lead character.

4) Having a satisfactory ending. These tend to the twist in the tale which is not the only option but is a popular one for very short stories.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book and am happy to report that Shaun Jeffrey has moved on since to write novels and even had one of his novels, ‘The Kult’, made into a film which will be released soon. It’s also worth noting the fine pen and ink illustrations by Zach McCain, one for each tale, that adds a little extra touch of the macabre. All in all, an entertaining little collection that’s well worth reading.



( )
  bigfootmurf | Sep 5, 2020 |
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally here.)

It's always a crap-shoot here whenever a book of horror stories gets sent along for possible review; because although I'm a slobbering fan of certain types of genres (science-fiction, for example), and try to champion and defend good genre work here as much as possible, it's also true that I in particular just don't happen to be much of a fan of horror specifically (nor romance, nor crime, nor westerns, nor a whole series of other popular genres). And that's always the problem with genre work, and why it's called that in the first place, and why people are always slagging on it versus so-called "mainstream fiction" -- because the majority of it appeals only to existing fans of that genre, and only by delivering in spades all the fetishistic details associated with that genre, not because of it being a good book in general that will appeal to a broad cross-section of the population.

Take for example Shaun Jeffrey's story collection Voyeurs of Death, put out by basement press Doorways Publications; because the fact is that as a non-fan of horror, I can't say I particularly cared for it, although acknowledge that genre fans are sure to like it a lot more than I did. And indeed, Jeffrey has certainly proven his chops within the horror community already; nearly every story found here has already been published in one various fanzine or another, and in fact I can easily picture most of these pieces providing exactly eight minutes of light entertainment while sitting on the toilet with the latest issue of Phantasmagoratroninomicon. (Ah, who can ever forget the '70s glory days of Phantasmagoratroninomicon?) But that's the precise problem with these stories too, is that they barely exist from a general literary standpoint, with many of them being essentially eight-minute experiments in yelling "BOO!," using sometimes a whole collection of the most hackneyed tropes found in the entire genre. A "haunted" Scottish tourist-trap island turns out to actually be haunted...a crazed serial killer thinks she's the Tooth Fairy...witch-like older women use their quilting club as a cover for nefarious supernatural deeds; none of them are exactly bad premises, and none of them are written particularly badly, but neither do any of them seem to exist much beyond their cliched premises either.

Take for a very typical example the story "The Watchers" (and yes, I'm about to reveal the end of this particular story, so skip to the next paragraph now if you don't want it spoiled), which starts with an intriguing idea that had me interested from the get-go, of a young British couple who decide one night to actually participate in the urban legend of "dogging" (that is, having sex in your car in rural public places like parks and highway rest-stops, while others gather around the car and watch through the windows, a source of fascination for many Brits but something much more often talked about than actually done); but then just barely a couple of pages into it, it's revealed that the woman is actually a Satanist and that this was all an elaborate ruse to get her new boyfriend out into the woods in the middle of the night, at which point he's kidnapped and presumably chopped up or eaten or burned alive or whatever it is that dumpy suburban British satanic dogging enthusiasts are into these days.

And...um, well, that's it, a story with an entire plotline of, "Dude goes into the woods and gets killed," not exactly a satisfying read for someone like me who doesn't naturally care for Satanists or dark woods or any of the other details seen here. And that's why such books are always so tricky to review here, because it's actually not that bad a story for those who do naturally love such details, who legitimately are looking for just a small well-done scare and nothing else. So in that sense, then, Voyeurs of Death very much earns the solidly middle-of-the-road score it's receiving today; it'll be a pleasant surprise for those into such writers as, say, Joe Hill, yet can be easily skipped guilt-free by those who aren't. It should be kept in mind before picking up a copy.

Out of 10: 7.5 ( )
1 voter jasonpettus | Jan 14, 2009 |
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In the macabre world of Shaun Jeffrey, things are not always what they seem. A young boy 'fixes' dead things. A fairy tale has a far from happy ending. Clothes bring out the best -- and worst -- in the wearer. True love mutates into hatred and violence. Heroes become villains in the blink of an eye. Scenic vacation spots hide ancient evils. And a date at a secluded parking spot produces dire consequences. Voyeurs of Death delivers 15 tales of the macabre and surreal. Take a look inside ... if you dare.

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Shaun Jeffrey est un auteur LibraryThing, c'est-à-dire un auteur qui catalogue sa bibliothèque personnelle sur LibraryThing.

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