Nightmare Asylum & Other Deadly Delights by Sonia Kilvington is an anthology filled with creepy, enthralling, suspenseful stories. This collection of short stories written by Sonia Kilvington is perfect for horror lovers and for anyone wanting to branch out into reading this genre.

Trigger warnings: blood, murder, abuse, rape, kidnapping, manipulation, sexual abuse, torture, misogyny, stalking, emotional abuse, gaslighting

Firstly I would like to say a big thanks to Blackthorn Book Tours organising this book tour, and to them and Sonia Kilvington for sending me a copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I really like reading anthologies for a few reasons: short stories, not too complicated, they are pretty easy to read, can put it down easily after finishing one short story in it and then not have to remember characters, plot, etc. when picking it up again. And I definitely felt that way about this book. The stories are pretty short, there’s usually only a handful of characters (sometimes only 1 or 2) and a lot of them weren’t too complicated that I couldn’t get my head around things.

A lot of these stories are rooted in reality; there’s a chance that some of the things that happened in these short stories could easily happen in everyday life. The stories with paranormal elements obviously less so.

But I think that’s what I liked about these stories. They were very much about normal people, living their normal lives, and something pretty horrible happening. I did end up preferring/enjoying the ones based on more everyday things than I did the ones that had paranormal elements. Probably because they felt like they were more likely to actually happen and made me more scared/on edge.

One of them definitely made me not want to become a cleaner though. Especially if someone has a basement in there house. And also that it’s a very real fear that I have of being kidnapped or held hostage, etc. that I think a lot of women would relate too.

I thought this was a good book but not amazing. I definitely enjoyed it but I wasn’t immediately hooked into all of the stories and some of them I just didn’t really enjoy that much and I found myself shimming through some more than others.

I liked the writing style a lot. I felt like it the stories were written with just enough detail to make my mind conjure up some pretty gross and horrifying images as I read the stories. The only thing that sometime drew me out of the story was the dialogue. There were just moments when it sounded a bit unnatural to me. Like I think it could have felt more natural to me if characters abbreviated more words, especially commonly abbreviated words that weren’t. Or sometimes the dialogue felt a little stilted and forced. It didn’t quiet flow as naturally as it could have in my mind.

Overall, this was a very enjoyable short book of short stories that I happily read in one sitting. I would recommend it if you want to try getting into the horror genre (as even though these stories were creepy they were still very easy to read) or if you just want some short horror stories to read. There are definitely some very uneasy to read subjects in this book that might make you uncomfortable (I’ve tried to list them all in the trigger warning above) so I would recommend being aware of them before reading this book.