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Reviewed by Kimberlee J Benart for Readers' Favorite
Starting Over by Pernell Rogers is an intriguing collection of five short stories featuring women who experience unbelievable and horrific happenings in what begins as quite believable, even ordinary, events in their lives. In each story, we start with relatively ordinary events: a teen helping an elderly neighbor in his garden, a cross-country drive to a new job, a semiretired shopkeeper becoming curious about the comings and goings of a neighbor, kids exploring a dark and smelly basement, and a mom struggling to help a surviving child deal with grief. Two of the women are teens, one is newly divorced, one has retired with her husband to a favorite location in Peru, and the fifth is a married mother who tragically lost a beloved son to hemophilia. Will they survive these supernatural encounters?
In Starting Over, Pernell Rogers gives us five engagingly written and suspense-filled short stories that seamlessly merge the expected with the unexpected and the supernatural. I’m not usually a horror fan, but I really enjoyed these. Each story is unique in plot, setting, and characters. A common thread of guilt and retribution runs through three of them. The fourth involves a nightmarish presence in a newly purchased older home, and the fifth merges grief over the loss of a child with mysterious occurrences in his bedroom. The narrative is descriptive, well-paced, and packed with surprises. It builds on the ordinary actions and thoughts of the protagonists, adding aspects of horror and the macabre until it’s all frighteningly believable.
