 Are you an indigenous storyteller who likes to delve into the dark? Consider submitting a story to the open call for Never Whistle at Night, an anthology of indigenous dark fiction from Penguin Random House, edited by Shane Hawke and Ted Van Alst. If they accept your story, you'll be published alongside writers such as Owl Going Back, Rebecca Roanhorse, Shiri Deemalene, Tom Orange, and others. Find all submission details at ShaneHawk.com forward slash submit or neverwhistleatnight.com Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another episode of 31 Days of Halloween. Today we are talking about the razor blades in my head by Donnie Goodman. Now Donnie is a fellow YouTuber or was at one point in time. I forgot to look up beforehand. I know he has switched over to writing and this is his debut collection. In fact, if you read the afterward and all the bonus content at the end, he explains how each story came about. He also explains that he is working on a longer piece anywhere from 15 to 30,000 words. I'm looking forward to watching this author grow and learn and hone their craft. In fact, the one criticism I have, I'm going to throw all the way up front and this is why I gave the book four stars because I know he's going to get better. The writing in the stories were pretty inconsistent. Each one had, you can tell he's still trying to find his voice and that's not a bad thing. Please don't think that that's a bad thing. I'm just saying that you can tell that this is a new author. Some stories feel rushed, some stories feel almost incomplete, some stories especially at the end feel rushed going back to that point because I was enjoying so much of it. I wanted it to continue on and then it's just like nope, boom done. Some highlights in this one. I don't have the book with me so I may not remember the titles but something about the squared circle is a story about a wrestling, a wrestler and an upcoming wrestling match. There's a bit of found footage stuff to it. It's a very, very cool story and it's probably my favorite of the collection. The writing here is the best out of all of the stories. There's another one that's called something about why isn't always the question something like that. I enjoyed that one for the weirdness of it. I had no idea what was going on but I did enjoy the writing. Other ones is A Bloody Heist. I remember the title of that one. I blew through this collection so fast. It's not that the titles weren't memorable, it's just I read it in a single sitting. It's only like 100 pages and that's 100 Kindle pages so I went through it super fast. This one, A Bloody Heist is a very fun story that I had. I kind of had the same idea a long time ago and I'm not saying that you know please don't think I'm saying he ripped off ideas. I'm just saying I liked the idea so much I had thought about it at one point in time. He didn't use the twist that I was going to use which is it's these robbers who dress like vampires or named Mr. Barlow. We're going to talk about the names and some of these things too. Some of these stories. Mr. Barlow knows Fratu, Lestats, Dracula, El Santo. There's numerous ones and then there's a little bit of a twist at the end that you kind of see coming but it's still a super fun story. In my idea I was going to use vampires to rob banks kind of like a point break meets lost boys kind of thing because they wouldn't be caught on camera so you know but anyways it's just really good ideas. The story about the snowman was fantastic. I think it's called The Magic in the Hat. The snowmen I should say. There's more than one very very cool story. Let's see here. Gobble Gobble was was fun but the main thing I want to say about this collection was it's it has a little bit of everything. It's very diverse, very eclectic but it would be perfect. Each and every one of these stories would be perfect as an episode of Tales from the Crypt, especially Tales from the Crypt. I was thinking a bit of Creep Show too but I feel that it would be better as a Tales from the Crypt thing if they ever rebooted it or hell you know even in anthology a short film movie something like that it'd be absolutely fantastic. I love Donnie Goodman's imagination. I found some of these stories, especially the opening story, the razor blades in my head. It's just stuff that I hadn't seen before. Oddly enough and this is no slight to to the story really but one of the weakest stories I felt as far as I don't know it just didn't do anything for me was the old baking and it's that's the one I believe that is available by itself on on Amazon. I think the one about the wrestler the the squared ring needs to be or the squared circle needs to be needs to be the one that's out there for people to buy because I think it's a it's a better representation of Donnie's talents. There's another thing that I that I will say there weren't errors in the book that I found but there were a lot of places where it seemed like they were double spaced after the period and sometimes there was no space in between a quotation mark and the next word so it just I don't know it's probably editing errors or whatever but otherwise the book is really clean. I was impressed with that and the cover is absolutely gorgeous. I believe Justin T. Coons who's a fantastic artist he does all of the splatterpunk westerns from uh Death's Head Press I think is the name of the company is a fantastic artist uh and this cover especially man it it's absolutely gorgeous and I'm in awe and I'm really envious of it also so fantastic work there this is a great production for a first outing um and I am impressed and I respect Donnie Goodman's attention to detail uh but that's all I have to say about the book have you read the razor blades in my head by Donnie Goodman uh if you have let me know if you loved it if you hated it if you felt meh about it uh if you felt any of those things tell me in detail what you loved or didn't love about it so that we can have a discussion down there in the doobly-doo but until next time I have been E you have been U this has been another episode of 30 days of halloween I'll talk to you guys later bye bye