It’s a special feeling when a writer you have admired for years reviews your book! Kate Laity’s noir stories are fabulous, and to me, she is the undisputed queen of noir, so I was more than a little nervous about her review – almost too nervous to read it!
It does feel odd reading other peoples perspectives of your stories; as while you are writing them, you are so wrapped up in your own, enclosed little world of experiences and perceptions, it’s strange when someone enters your imaginary kingdom. “Mum’s off in book-land again” my daughter would say. “It’s pointless talking to her now” my husband would agree. Writers must be a nightmare to live with…
I will stop wittering now, and get on with the review, here is a snippet:
This collection of stories is shot through with a gothic ambience of darkness, disease and madness in the clinical sense. From its opening story death is always close by, reading to lay a cold hand on someone’s neck. The tales seldom wander far from the haunted corridors of the Asylum — proving you can change the name and the purpose but the horrors that happened there leave echoes that reverberate for a very long time.
Women wronged — and most often the men who wronged them (this is gothic horror after all) — figure prominently in this collection. Read more…
Sonia Kilvington 
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