Title: The Macabre Masterpiece: Poems of Horror and Gore
Author: Justin Bienvenue
Rating: 2/5
Summary: Have you ever wanted a tour of the infamous underground we know as Hell? To experience different angles of blood? To meet some of horrors most morbid and fearsome creatures? Or maybe you wish to get totally creeped out and be left in utter shock and suspense to the point where your heart is beating so fast but you can’t get enough!?
Review: Okay, I like poetry. God knows I write enough of it, have written dozens of passages, large and small, but never had the urge to publish them (though that is changing). However, the genre of horror poetry is something that intrigued me so I decided to give Justin Bienvenue’s book a chance. However, what awaited me in those pages, within those fifty in-depth poems was something that made my skin crawl worse than the horror themes that filled them. One of my biggest issues with poetry is rhyming, not that I am completely against it, I just simply am not a fan of poems that rhyme each and every line.
If I wanted constant rhyming I would go read Dr. Seuss or something out of Mother Goose’s stories. That does not mean that this is a bad book, in fact, once I forced myself to get beyond the every line must rhyme thing, I did enjoy some of the imagery that he created in the poems. I did think some of them were a bit redundant, having four poems concerning the river of blood or vampires was a tad much when there was more that could be done with each of these categories in my opinion without the redundancies.
I think my favorite chapter was the last one where things took a slightly more unsettling turn in so far as things went from being physical representations of horror to being a bit more psychological. From the Thirteen Stairs to the Inhibitors of Doom these, despite the rhyming had me sucked in because I love mess with your head imagery truth be told.
Is this something I would read again, probably not on the whole no, but I would definitely read bits and pieces of it, those that caught my attention more than others. I wish I could give it a higher rating than I did, but unfortunately the above issues kinda prohibit me from doing that. Very well done for a first publication and I look forward to seeing more of your work, perhaps with a little less rhyming.
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