I do love me a short story collection. I think there’s a certain skill to writing a good short story. It has to have enough substance on the very limited amount of pages to feel like you’ve read a whole novel. This means, all the info that the author decides to include has to be relevant, well presented (e.g. succinct and yet not leave you wanting) and the characters have to be fleshed out creatively. It can’t be easy writing a short story, it simply cannot. And yet, I have read so many good short story collections and my mind is blown how much some authors can do with limited word count. It’s unreal.

Last Light sits right up there with my favorite short story collections. What a variety of horror/thriller stories, each one so different when it came to characters, the themes and the focus points. It felt like I was able to read multiple super interesting books in a really short amount of time and I felt really excited! 

I won’t go into each story in detail and it’s really difficult for me to pick out one or two, they all left me with a wow-effect as I read the last sentence of each story. I will simply highlight the final story of the collection which I felt was a terrific choice for a last story because it leaves the reader with a lasting effect. Simply brilliant. But, yes, each story has soul in it. Each story has a different aspect of humanity that it focuses on, be it fear, love, guilt, greed… Via smooth writing style and a very focused conflict for each of the stories, a multitude of entertaining resolutions and unexpected twists were delivered. Chris Coppel is very creative and without having to resort to outright gore and detailed graphic scenes, he deliver effective and clever conclusions. I would recommend readers to check out this collection for sure.