Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Twittering from the Circus of the Dead

This one is for readers who like gruesome horror stories (bonus if you're a fan of Joe Hill). It's free online at Nightmare magazine. I'm not into Twitter (I don't need any more electronic time-sucks in my life) or the horror genre, but this one grabbed me in the end ... in a gory, creepy way.

A teenage girl, Blake, is on a family vacation, and she thinks it's hell (she doesn't know from hell, but just wait). She spends all of her time online, madly tweeting about this terrible vacation she's on and the awful things her parents and brother are doing. The whole story consists solely of tweets.

The story takes a good long while to get rolling, and seriously, I'd unfollow anyone who tweets as often and relentlessly as Blake does. (There are a few subtle hints at What Is To Come that I appreciated.) But on the long drive home her dad decides to stop at a rather odd circus in some out-of-the-way spot (I think they were in Utah, lol; maybe I'd better watch out). And then ... well, read it for yourself, if you like horror and (view spoiler)[zombies (hide spoiler)].

It was written in 2010 (maybe that explains why Hill uses "twittering" rather than "tweeting"?) but was reprinted in Nightmare magazine's May 2016 issue. One of my co-reviewers at Fantasy Literature stumbled onto a link to it on Twitter, lol.

Content advisory: Significant gore and some language.