Chain Letter (Mini-Review)

This review was written for an ARC of the book.

Chain Letter is a book by Stephen Simpson in which a chain mail kills people who delete it. Lisa finds her daughter in danger and races to save her.

It is hard to write a convincing horror story where something like an e-mail seems deadly. This is due in due, in part, to horror films that utterly failed to hold up to any kind of logic. So Stephen Simpson did not have an easy job with this book.

So will this be the book to convince you that a horror story about a haunted chain mail can be done? If you don't already like the idea, this won't be the book to change your mind. But if you stick with it, it does a good job at holding up its own plot. At least the culprit behind the haunted chain mail isn't an anti-technology group.

One of the things holding this book back is the author not being good at writing in present tense which gives the book a very childish quality. A well written book in present tense can make the story feel very fast paced. In that sense choosing present tense was a good choice for this book.

Another thing was that the book needed to be edited a little bit more. The spelling held up for the most part, but the punctuation needed a little bit more work.

The switching to various victims is done well throughout the majority of the book, but is done poorly near the end. How poorly? To the point I was actually bored as people were being killed.

I would recommend Chain Letter to anyone seeking out a decent horror.