Reviewed by Sarina
TITLE: Devil’s Jawbone
AUTHOR: BJ Sheppard
PUBLISHER: Self Published
LENGTH: 48,170 words (approx 121 pages)
BLURB:
As night descends on the town of Devil’s Jawbone, no one is safe. The veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, and the darkest side of human nature is boiling to the surface. The supernatural and the natural are colliding, and in this sleepy town, the bump in the night is taking human form. Innocence will be lost; the villain will become the victor; spirits will rise and Satan himself will come to town.
In an eerie collection of short speculative fiction, author BJ Sheppard will grab your imagination, bringing new life to the classic campfire tales synonymous with the scariest of occasions. Halloween will never be the same again.
REVIEW:
Oh my god. Just seriously, oh my god. Devil’s Jawbone is not a quaint little town, it is not a vacation destination and I’m sure if there were any yelp reviews they would all be one stars and something along the lines ‘abandon all hope ye who enter here’ or ‘just run very far away’. Going into this book I thought I had a good grasp of what a horror story was but before I was even halfway through the stories in this collection I was proved wrong. So very, very wrong. There are eleven stories in this book that I’ve heard compared to the type of horror ‘campfire stories’ that people used to hear as children. All I can say is that these aren’t like any tales that I ever heard. I think there are maybe two stories in the collection where someone doesn’t end up dead and in the remaining stories there is still some form of torture.
The first story in the book, Legion, was a good first glimpse of the town though it did leave me with more questions than answers; I also found myself expecting to read something that dealt more with ghosts but that wasn’t the case. The tales that followed were varied and dealt with a laundry list of different horror story types from the murderer in the woods to a mad scientist conducting sci-fi like experiments. The last story is what brought the book together, however, and finally explained just what was going on with Devil’s Jawbone, which I thought was awesome. Now, while this is also a m/m book, in most of the stories that aspect is a background thing and nothing is really shown as far as sexual content is concerned; the focus of the stories is horror, plain and simple. I did enjoy the anthology and if I had read it in the dark I’d probably be worried about my dreams later ( I am not ashamed to admit that I’m still fairly horrified by one story, Long Pig and probably will be for a while.) but this isn’t a book for everyone. You really need to love horror stories to get the most out of this collection and if too much murder and gore sends you running for the hills (or the bathroom) I’d steer clear of this one.
RATING: 
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