Strings by Allison M. Dickson

BLURB:

Allison M. Dickson presents a chilling tale of entrapment and greed. Do you have freedom? Do you have control? After four years of turning tricks in a mob-run New York brothel to pay off a debt, Nina is ready to go back to a quiet life in Iowa. Just one more client and the whole nightmare will be behind her, but this last trick turns into a battle for her soul. Meanwhile, the brothel’s sadistic Madam has been hiding away money in order to move up in her family’s organization, and she only wants the half million dollars the reclusive millionaire pays for the girls. But her driver Ramón has other ideas, making off with the money left behind when Nina’s last trick goes unexpectedly awry. The theft comes at a great cost to the Madam, setting off a horrific chain of events that changes them all. The hooker. The driver. The Madam. All of them on a collision course to a place where only madness holds sway. Who is pulling your Strings?

THE AUTHOR:Allison M. Dickson lives in Dayton, Ohio and has been writing since she could hold pencil to paper. It’s only in recent years that she started treating the craft as a career. After earning a few small publishing credits, she started selling her short stories online, where she gained a decent following with short stories that include her bestselling titles “Dust” and “Vermin.” She soon caught the attention of author and visionary Vincent Hobbes, and her relationship with Hobbes End Publishing solidified with her two contributions to the second volume of The Endlands, and finally with their acceptance of her visceral thriller novel, STRINGS, an expansion of her hit short story “The Good Girls” which released 10/26/13. Additionally, Hobbes End will be releasing her dystopian science-fiction epic, THE LAST SUPPER, in spring of 2014.When she isn’t writing, she can be found every Thursday on the podcast Creative Commoners, a show she co-hosts with her partners in crime, Chris Armstrong and Corey Bishop:http://creativecommoners.net.

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AUTHOR INTERVIEW:

I am a horror author, but I promise I’m not a freak. There isn’t a body hidden beneath the floorboards in my house, and I don’t have anyone tied up in my basement (because I don’t have a basement, but that’s beside the point). I also don’t revel in violence and I’m far from titillated by blood and gore. If anything, I’m as much disturbed by some of what I write as any of my readers are, and I’m even more prone to being afraid of some of the movies and books I read. I don’t know where my desire to write about the dark side of life comes from necessarily, and I’m not sure I want to know. I’m only grateful that it’s there, because it’s given me a career.

In a recent interview, I was asked what’s inside the mind of a horror author and I was later asked to expand upon it. Originally, I said horror authors’ minds aren’t much different from any others but they do have this desire to shine a light on the darkness that lives in all of us. People who aren’t a fan of the horror genre aren’t without this darkness. They just don’t like to look at it, and that’s okay. There are people who like to highlight on the positive and make people feel good, but make no mistake: horror writers like to make you feel good too. Only, it’s more of an inverse process. Anyone who has ever been through a rough time in their lives, be it losing a loved one or financial hardship or being the victim of a violent crime, I think we can all say that when we reach a place of peace and healing, we have a new gratitude for it.

To get technical about it, horror stories try to simulate those events by activating the same parts of the brain that are active during times of peril. It serves the same purpose that minor thrill seeking does, like riding a rollercoaster or skydiving. By the time you put down that book or finish that movie, we want you to feel more alive than you did before. We want you to feel glad it’s over and that you have this otherwise normal and sort of mundane life, but at least you’re not being held captive in a decrepit old mansion by a human spider. Sometimes when I watch movies or read books that are too positive, the opposite happens to me. I look at my life and find it starkly unfulfilling and mundane in comparison, and that can depress me. Maybe that’s just an odd quirk about my mind, but I think it’s why I tend to stray to the darker side of things. I crave that shift in perspective, and I think a lot of people out there do too.

Another thing people assume about dark fiction authors is that we are cynics and pessimists in daily life. Now, I don’t want to fool anyone into thinking that this isn’t the case. Writers can be some of the most jaded people out there. In many cases, it’s why they write. But I also argue that there is a lot of optimism buried in horror, because the underlying message in a lot of it is: “See how much WORSE things could be?” My book STRINGS is probably the most grim piece of fiction I have ever written or will ever write, but it was also written by an optimist who believes that human beings are as equally capable of good as they are of bad, and that even the worst among us have a spark of humanity that can be coaxed into a flame under the right conditions. Of course, it could just as easily go the other way too, but that’s not pessimism. That’s just reality.

MY REVIEW:

I honestly don’t read a lot of horror novels because I had my fill of King, Koontz, etc when I was much younger.  But after reading the summary for Strings I was intrigued.  Strings is intense, gritty, and utterly horrific. Allison Dickson pulls you into nightmares you could not possibly fathom.

There is plenty of back ground story for the main characters, the hooker, the driver, and the madame.   Strings intertwines the mob, prostitution, greed, eccentricity, and “other” abominations into a complex story that is so intense I couldn’t stop reading it.  I had to find out if anyone survives their cruel and insane situations.  I pretty much felt beat up after reading Strings. It was that intense.

The situations are intense, gory at times,  beyond cruel, and did I say intense?  If you enjoy reading books involving the above mentioned items then Strings will not disappoint you.