After The Fade by Ronald Malfi
(DarkFuse)
It was a typical evening at a local Annapolis tavern, until a girl walked in, collapsed and died.
The cause of her death was anything but natural. Something had latched itself to the base of her skull. Some type of creature unlike anything seen before.
And it didn’t arrive alone.
Now, the patrons of The Fulcrum are trapped, held prisoner within the tavern’s walls by monstrous things that flit across the night sky, trying to find their way in.
What I really enjoy about Ronald Malfi’s fiction is his sense of description of where the stories are taking place. He has an uncanny ability to put the reader in the middle of the story and the action.
In his latest book from DarkFuse, “After The Fade”, the story takes place in The Fulcrum, a local watering hole. It is populated with a few employees, a few regulars and a couple out of towners.
A local girl staggers into the bar and dies but what they find attached to the back of her head is what really sets the story in motion.
Though the story is short, it still packs quite a wallop as the patrons and employees work to figure out what is going on. There is a palpable sense of dread, tension and fright throughout the tale. His characters are fully realized and three dimensional. Even though it is a novella, I was still able to become emotionally involved with the characters and what they were going through.
The best part of the book for me was the ending. Simply superb and actually quite stunning, as I was prepared for a different ending and Ron just totally through me for a loop.
DarkFuse and Ronald Malfi have come up with another winner and I highly recommend it.
