A Glimpse of Fear: A Small Collection of Short Stories by B.S. Miller
Page Street Publishing (August 2024)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
B.S. Miller is a horror writer and teacher who lives with her husband and children in a somewhat secluded area south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, surrounded by critters, crows, and coyotes. Miller earned her MA in Literature from the University of New Orleans and is a member of the Horror Writers Association. Her newest collection is A Glimpse of Fear, a collection of short stories and two poems, currently available for less than a dollar on Kindle.
The stories in this collection are varied and disconnected, so the collection reads very much like a sampler. Some, like “The Bellhousing,” are only a few pages in length, but their size does not diminish their potency in any way. Others, like “The Smallest Exorcism,” are a more traditional short story length, but have striking plots with visceral imagery that the reader won’t soon forget. The fiction in the collection is varied, but one gets a sense that Miller has chosen these specific stories to go together for a specific reason, only readers don’t get to know what it is. This creates a delicious tension in the collection, and there seems to be an invisible thread stringing these jewels together that begs to be discovered.
The poems at the end of the collection add a bit of fun to the overall whole. “Entombment” is a thick and lush, descriptive piece. “Epiphany” is a found poem based on The Count of Monte Cristo. Like the stories, the poems are as disparate as can be and serve to augment the collection with two more pieces for readers to sample and enjoy.
This is a quick, tight collection of horror stories and poetry. B. S. Miller creates haunting narratives that read quickly but linger with the reader long after they’ve put the book down. It’s a small collection, but more than worth the price, and horror readers will thrill to read this new voice in horror.
