Review: Danse Macabre by Laura M. Hughes

Surprise audiobooks are the best audiobooks! I had read this lovely little novella last year with a pretty ridiculous amount of enjoyment and hadn’t heard that there was an audiobook until there was! Well, I couldn’t not immediately jump on it and spend the evening listening to it.

The dead beckon and the little girl obeys. Night after night she answers the graveyard’s call, though she dreads her encounters with the creature that dwells there.

But she’ll soon come to learn that memories are much more dangerous than monsters…

It’s a perfectly ordinary snail – except that it’s eyes, perched atop their slender stalks, seem to be waving. At Blue. They squirm and wiggle urgently. This is a bad thing! they seem to warn. A very bad thing!

This is a very good creepy story and it got itself a really, really good creepy audiobook version.

This story follows a ten year old girl named Blue, who is given a mission by a creature who claims to be an angel to save her mother and sister’s souls. She has to kill ten sinners. Our chapters count down from ten to one as the story progresses.

This story has some fantastic prose, and the world it describes so well is a gloomy one. This story isn’t scary, exactly, though it is quite dark. The character we know as Him is quite disturbing at times. Again, creepy. You’re starting to see here why I’ve never written a review of this little novelette despite liking it quite a lot. I have a hard time putting words to my thoughts about it. I’m trying to do more than ‘it’s creepy and amazing so you should give it a read’ but it is both of those things.

Now, this is a fantastic audiobook. You can read it in an hour, and the audiobook is about 2. I recommend it in audio for a couple of reasons. First of all, the narrator, Nigel Peever does no less than perform the hell out of this story. There is so much emotion where there should be, the voice he gives to Him is just perfect, and his performance brought the prose to life in my head. Best of all, there are special effects and bits of music peppered in here that add a whole extra level of awesome. It made something already great even more great. I think that of a lot of audiobooks, but this one might be my new prime example.

A fantastic gothic horror novelette for a lovely evening of listening. The audiobook is less than $5. Well, well worth it. I love it.

Especially Snail ❤

5/5 stars!

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