Brother’s Last Call

Author: Dennis Freeman
Category: Horror Short Story, Angels & Demons
Suitable for: Adults
My Rating: 3 Stars
Format Read for Review: Kindle copy provided for judgement in the Indie Horror Book Awards.
Pages: 48

This story takes us to a bar where an angel and a demon meet up and reminisce about 2 past souls they reaped, all while killing time, waiting to reap more souls.

This book wasn’t bad but there was also something off about it. I can’t quite put my finger on it but hopefully I’ll get there by the end of this review. Overall I’m settling on 3 stars which means “it’s OK/ I liked it, but it could be improved.” It could also use some editing and I’m not sure if this was only my copy but the formatting was awful. There were line gaps in the middle of sentences, and even new chapters would start in the middle of a sentence. I feel like it tried to put a new perspective on good and evil and implied it isn’t always that black and white but even in this story I felt like it kind of was. Except for the one case of the psycho who it turns out was more or less influenced to be the way he was, so maybe he wasn’t evil, but he was still being controlled by evil. The bad guys in this book parade as “misunderstood.” The fallen angel/demon of death acted like she wasn’t “evil” yet she tortured people and caused them to hurt others, nothing “misunderstood” about that. I think the concept of redefining good and evil was a cool one, but not well demonstrated here. There were some cool ideas in this book and I could see why some people would really enjoy it, even if I found the story to be a little weak. I did like, and found it shocking what happened to the first human in the story to die. That was surprising and therefor fun, as well as a good cautionary tale for why you never make a deal with the devil. Because, you don’t always know what you are getting. I thought the relationship between the angel and demon was cheesy and unbelievable. Like, ‘tell God and the others I love and miss them but brb I need to go torture someone who only made the mistake of trusting me lol’ (not a real quote but I feel that sums up the whole story).

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