Sugar Daddy

(Originally published at Red Adept Reviews.)

Overall: 5 stars.

Plot/Storyline: 5 stars. I was pulled in from the description, which made me purchase it, to the actual execution of the story. There was a lot of suspense here and I had a strong desire to read on and find out what was going to happen next. I felt like I was in the hands of an expert writer who knew his genre. There was all the built-in dread that I could hope for.

A portion of the story is told from the point of view of an author who was a part of these events and who is looking back at it at a distance of twenty years, telling it to an audience as if it's fiction. The events he remembers are current, with mentions of Red Bull and Vodka and the Jodie Foster movie Panic Room as a movie that is not too far in the past for them. Since the author is looking back on this twenty years from now, it's good to know that writers will still be of interest and in demand. This is a promise, right?

Characters: 5 Well-drawn recognizable characters here. The guy who dreams of better things, and who looks at his friends with a barely concealed sense of superiority, the opportunist with questionable morals and get-rich-quick schemes who is destined to fail, the long-time customers of a bar, drinking their drinks and measuring their lives by empty beer bottles and puffs of cigarettes. I felt like I not only knew these types, but also these particular people.

Writing Style: 5 stars. The descriptions and dialogue were so well done that I felt like I was there, a part of the author's world, unable to look away. I was enthusiastic from blurb, and it was great that the actual writing allowed the interesting story to be brought to life and handled expertly.

I had a really interactive experience due to the writing. I wondered what was going to happen. I tried to figure it out. I looked at certain lines and wondered if they were foreshadowing or contained clues. Sometimes I could tell something was a clue and that I tried to decipher the clue. All the time Mr. Menapace doled out just enough to keep me eagerly reading.

Mr. Menapace also wrote this with a great awareness and a sly sense of humor. He switched between first person and third person and I thought, “oh, that's a risky thing to do,” later in the story his author character commented, “It's a risky technique - switching perspective back and forth like that - but if you're careful, it can be a nifty took in the toolbox.” This was not the only time that the author character, talking to people in an auditorium, talks to the reader as well. I'd say more about this aspect, but would prefer readers to discover exactly how it pans out without my spoiling it.

The author sets up the concept of there being something scary behind a locked door, and that's a classic. Stephen King wrote many years ago about how a reader's imagination is bigger than anything an author can produce. When the Bad Thing shows up there is usually a letdown, or at least a release of tension, because the reality, the tangible monster, can never match what the reader - or viewer, in the case of movies - had conjured up in his or her imagination. This story has a door, and the author knows the nature of the story needs the door to be opened and for the characters and the reader to enter in and see what's beyond the door, and in doing so he risks disappointing the reader in the way King wrote about. Whether or not he succeeds is for the reader to decide, but I think he got away with it by focusing on the nature of dread, which is in anticipation, and the idea that any dread the reader felt waiting for the door to open is but a fraction of what someone would feel if they waited decades for the other shoe to drop after surviving the thing in the room.

This is a story meant for people who not only enjoy horror, but who appreciate writing as a craft. Yeah, I liked it a whole lot.

Editing: 5 stars. He left the first “t” out of Fred Flintstone. Inexcusable. Pistols at dawn.

(Added: Red Adept Winner in Horror, 2011)