12 July 2006

Safe At Home by C. Dennis Moore (Creative Guy Publishing, 2002)

Safe at Home. The title conjures the standard feelings of comfort and stability; the spooky looking house on the cover conjures the opposite feelings. Inside, the story opens with a young couple, Jim and Monica, moving into their first apartment together. There's a lot of fuss made over security -- including the fact that the couple are only given one key between them. Shortly after they move in, there is a murder in the building. Then another. Then Jim finds himself the prime suspect.

The plot is interesting; the set-up, clever, but C. Dennis Moore is not a master storyteller. Not yet, anyway. It's pretty clear that Safe at Home is a freshman effort that could have benefited from a more strict editor, though overall the result is a well-paced horror/thriller where an everyman is accused of the unthinkable.

Safe at Home
is a short eBook (this review is of the pdf version) that bundles the short story (about 70 pages) with the back story, part of the screenplay version, and even deleted scenes which makes it sort of like a DVD. These "special features" are interesting, but once I had read the story, I didn't really want to read the screenplay, not even out of curiosity. For the sake of this review I did read it, however, and I can safely say that while the story is better off in it's published form, it does feel like something between an episode of Tales From the Crypt and CSI, if you were to tell the story from the point of view of the accused.

***

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Also referenced:
Tales From the Crypt -- get the first season at Amazon.ca
CSI -- get the complete first season at Amazon.ca

tags: ebook, thriller, review, bookreview