Quarter to Midnight: Fifteen Tales of Horror and Suspense

Quarter to Midnight contains fifteen short stories. Most of them were pretty entertaining, but my two favorites were:

"Whose Woods These Are"- This story (#4 in the collection) was probably my favorite overall; it definitely was the first one that really made me sit up and take notice. It's a legitimately creepy story about a woman revisiting woods she used to camp in with her parents. Too late she learns why the forest is no longer open to visitors. This is easily the most legitimately unnerving story in the collection, and after reading it, I knew I was hooked.

"Sub Basement" - A low level employee has to make a run to his office building's foreboding subbasement where he encounters horror after horror. I loved everything going on in this story and could have read even more about the suspicious company and its sinister building.

While those two were my favorites, all of these stories are worth a read. While they're sometime predictable, Coates makes up for it by making them all a lot of fun. I will definitely be reading more by her.

The stories are OK. Not as well crafted as one would like and seem a bit simple in context. But the stories are interesting if somewhat “underwhelming” in how they are told.

The stories in this book remind me of the "cheesy" stories from the old Twilight Zone episodes. It's ok to kill some time if your really bored. I found a lot of typos. Some editing would have been a good idea.

short stories that a fast quick and quirky

Really enjoyed this! I would read a chapter each night with my husband arou d halloween time and it was so fun. None of them are bad, and then some of them were really great! You'll enjoy this if you like ghosty horror

I am hooked on her books! All of them are a MUST read! They will keep you enthralled & keep you on the edge of your seat!

I love all things horror. Stories. Movies. Haunted Houses. Urban Legends. All of it. In fact my first foray into the world of horror was Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark when I was six.

Sadly, that is what this collection of short stories felt like. None of them were particularly scary (in fact I read most of them home alone, in the dark and went to sleep shortly thereafter). A couple of them stood out as being enjoyable (or maybe more accurately memorable), while most of the others were either just okay, or insanely boring. This would be perhaps in part to the fact that these are incredibly short, so we often don't get any rhyme or reason to why certain things happen. They just do. Or perhaps it is the way some of these ended in extremely predictable ways. By far my favorites of the bunch were Whose Woods are These, Mannering House, and Lucy. Those are ones I can hear being told around campfires as part of a "small town urban legend".

Now, I've read one of the this author's longer stories and I know what she is capable of as far as world building and bringing tension to her stories. And while there were glimpses of that talent in these, in my opinion, they were just too short to make a good impression (unless perhaps you are easily unnerved). And because I've seen what she is capable of, I will continue reading more from this author.