Attain The Lord Came At Twilight Conceived By Daniel Mills In Brochure

weird tales that make up The Lord Came at Twilight are powerful and strange.
As in his haunting novel, Revenants, Mills evokes the storied past of the north east of the United States.
But his prose is never mere historical pastiche, never antique or fustian, but clear, sharp, Some of these tales, as Revenants is, are ghost stories, but others, for me the best, are darkling ecstasies.
Premature vague endings are balanced out by the atmospheric writing, I'm someone who tolerates a fair amount of ambiguity, but it was jarring and frustrating to reach some of the conclusions that came seemingly midsentence during lead up.
DNF Full review here: sitelink innsmouthfreepress. com/blo

Short version: Buy this book! I've been looking forward to reading this for a long time.
Mills has staked out a wide territory for himself as an author of historical horror, particularly American colonial and frontier horror, and that's one of my favorite combinations of things.
I'd read a couple of these stories in other anthologies and enjoyed them, and expected more of the same.


And that's exactly what I got, almost to a fault, These stories are varied in the kind of horror they include, from an almost StrangerThings esque town rot to a cult to a devil to some more Romantic era oddity, and they're varied in voicesome more Hawthorne, some Hoffman, others a bit Poe.
Some of them are really excellent, Dust from a Dark Flower has a very nice focus on texture and some unusual variations on its demon rot idea.
My favorite by far was the Young Goodman Brown analogue John Blake, a story that goes hard on a fiendish and depraved figure who isn't the devil exactly but has the air of something that shouldn't exist in the world.
I was really impressed with that one, Honestly, though, the rest were kind of underwhelming, Some too ambiguous, others too experimental, many using a trope I'm not particularly fond of the photographer's story, for instance, or Louisa, but mostly flawed in that they all feel like they were written in the past.


I guess I can see the appeal of this at timeshow better to capture the voice of a historical person than to write like historical people wrote And yet it comes up repeatedly against this issue that people back then couldn't write well.
All the characters sound the sameanonymous middle class white men writing in a shared style that leaves little room for personality.
It's just a bit disappointing to see an author finally try to write an anthology full of one of my favorite neglected story types, only to find they're writing under a handicap that keeps them from making anything truly interesting.
It makes me appreciate Jesse Bullington's novels all the more, finding human experience that would not or maybe could not have been put down in the fictional or memoir techniques of the time and bringing them out with modern prose and characterization.
Mills presumably sees it differently, but for me the point of his stories is that they take place in the past, not that they mimic the fiction of the past.
Meh.
I love a good scary story, I dont know if theres a way to say I dont care for most of the classic i.
e. old timey kind, though, without seeming uncouth, purveyor of plebeian tastes at best, And yettry as I mightM, R. James and so on are way too dense, monotone and tedious for me to enjoy, Nevertheless, one can still hold out some expectations for a well done pastiche, usually those tend to veer toward the cosmic side of things, but this wasnt the case here.
Thetales of this anthology were all aged like the proverbial fine wine probably ok for me to make that comparison since I dont like wine to very much echo the voices of the masters.
Daniel Mills New England is a gloomy, candlelit, thoroughly repressed place of dated mannerisms and mentalities, And, of course, long, long winters, In fact, it is a perfect place to go mad or be driven to that destination by some terrible events.
The settings may

be antiquated, but the terror is real, more so in fact because of the isolation and backwardness of the surroundings.
So yeah, as suspected, while the book stuck to form pretty strictly, it was still infinitely more readable than the tales that inspires and determined the form in the first place.
Nevertheless, it took me a while to get into, sometime around The Photographers Tale, maybe, And then John Blake and stories after were all uniformly pretty good, In fact, all the way until the end with the exception of the very last story, my interest was maintained.
Mainly because the quality was there, Mills did a good job with plotting, yes, but he really exceled with the settings, its creepy, eerie, desolate.
Its dark, relentlessly dark, especially the places the candlelight doesnt reach and it is there, of course, that the nightmares wait.
Would electric light dispel some of the terrors within these pages Well, considering how much genre nowadays is set in New England and especially Maine, that is debatable.
But if youre looking to be disturbed and terrified by stories set specifically before the advent of modern conveniences, thisll certainly do the trick.
Its definitely not for me as such, not the first or second preference, but all the same an interesting selection.
Interesting to contemplate why authors return to that specific era to emulate those specific authors, For me, classics have always mostly meant old, Few things are genuinely timeless, Mostly theres just a certain kind of esteemed affection for books/movies from the past, despite their potential lack of relevance, laughable datedness and antiquated attitudes.
Something about temporarily rejection of modernity thats also very trendy as one puts down their smartphone to pontificate on the relevance of a popular relic.
Of course, this doesnt apply to all thats considered classics, but a fair amount, But the world goes on, the movies have dialogue and technicolor, clothes change, mentalities albeit slower also change.
Writing pastiches is an interesting exercise, but it also seems like something of an affectation, Although when done right as is the case here, less so, Anyway, Im sure theres a fan base just for this sort of thing wholl love this book.
And even new fans who might discover and enjoy these well crafted tales of terror, so read them if you dare.
By candlelight if you can, Mills short stories move like calm waters, with an absolute, impeccable experience, His prose is breathtaking as much as the haunting memories that is etched in his ink squalls.
Voices that are heard from afar, a photographers grim discovery and pure naked beauty looking for a sacrifice of sorts.
Mills calls from the crisp twilight landscapes and does not let a reader down,

Favorites:
The Hollow
The Photographers Tale
The Wayside Voices
The Naked Goddess.