Short Story Review – A Glimpse of Darkness by Lara Adrian, Harry Connolly, Stacia Kane, Kelly Meding, and Lucy A. Snyder

I was interested in reading this novella for a couple of reasons.  First, I like a lot of the authors that helped write this and second, it was an interesting experiment in letting their readers pick the course of the story.  So basically as a reader you got to vote on which way you wanted the story to go and the author that wrote the next chapter followed that plot direction.

This is a story about Munira, the half-human daughter of a fire djinn.  She is a Retriever, someone who retrieves (aka steals) things.  An evil wizard contacts Munira to have her Retrieve something for him from the underworld, when Munira refuses the wizard holds her father captive until she complies.  What follows is a crazy adventure into the Underworld.  After the story the first chapters from books by each author is included.

There were a lot of aspects I enjoyed in this short story.  Munira as a half-fire djinn has some really cool powers and it was fun to read about that.  Each of the authors writes a chapter and tries to play to there strong points as an author.  I enjoyed the world and the concepts behind the story.

The things I liked about this story was that it was high action and creative.  The e-book includes excepts from the authors’ books at the end which was nice.  It was a good way to get a feel for the authors’ writing style to help you decide if you would like it or not.

My biggest problem with this was that each chapter felt a little disjointed because of the shifts in writing style.  It was so apparent that it jarred you out of the story some.  So, I had trouble staying engaged in the story.  Each author definitely has their own style and focuses on different aspects of writing and it is very easy to see this, but also disruptive to the story.

Overall this was a neat experiment and results in an okay story.  The ideas behind the story are solid but the jolt in style between chapters makes the story a bit disjointed and hard to stay engaged in.  If you are trying to decide whether or not to read things from these authors then this should help you decide what writing styles work for you and what don’t.  For the price it’s not a bad read.