The woods are not safe.Especially at night.Felton takes his younger brother for a walk through the Magpie King’s forest, hoping to change his life for the better.Things do not go as planned.And They Were Never Heard From Again is set in Benedict Patrick’s Yarnsworld, and is the perfect introduction to the world readers are calling a ‘delightfully weird, dark fairytale’.Grab your copy today, and … weird, dark fairytale’.
Grab your copy today, and discover new reasons to be afraid of the dark.
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Hailing from a time when nursery rhymes and fairytales were about choppers chopping off heads, wolves’ stomachs being sewn up full of stones, and witches eating children; dark and creepy fairytales are somewhat ingrained in my psyche. With this tale, Patrick managed to rekindle some of that sense of wonder and dread; the sort that fades away with age, but is still buried within us.
The story is short, and simply told, but left me with a satisfied, eerie feeling. It’s the type of book you might read aloud when the hearth fire is burning low at night. I’ll be checking out more of his Yarnsworld tales! Good stuff.
A lot of kindle freebies are mediocre at best. This isn’t one of those.
This was my first of Benedict Patrick’s Yarnsworld stories, and it did an excellent job capturing the eerie atmosphere of the Magpie King’s Forest without dumping too much information on a new reader. The story’s young protagonists, Felton and Tad, have their personal flaws (including a short scene mentioning the older brother, Felton, touching a girl without her consent–an issue that unfortunately goes unaddressed but at least doesn’t happen again), but they’re likable enough to carry a short horror story. To say too much about the plot would pretty quickly give things away, but the tension builds brilliantly to a climax that left me suitably surprised and creeped out. If you’re fond of spooky magical forest stories, you’ll probably be familiar with a number of elements the story uses, but it uses them in a way that feels fresh rather than just a rehash of old tropes.
5/5 stars, would retell around a campfire in a spooky forest and ready for more Yarnsworld books
A grim and dark folklore story, the cautionary tale And They Were Never Heard From Again tells the adventure of young Felton and his even younger brother Tad, as the two of them set off for a nearby village. The problem arises as they venture back through the forest, and they find themselves too late – the bell tolls in the distance, and they are locked outside with the monsters of the night.
Their only hope for salvation lies with the Magpie King, and the boys pray he hears their pleas. Otherwise, they will not survive the night.
“A story is a dangerous thing, Felton Herder. We must value them, we must be careful with them. Set one loose on the world, and you lose all control over your own creation.”
This is an excellent short story, gripping, and brilliantly executed with wonderful characters, terrifying creatures of nightmare, and with a moral just as applicable to today’s society as it would have been one of old.
A solid 5 stars! I will definitely be looking into this series in the near future.
The covers for this series are so amazing. It’s the main reason I downloaded it. Didn’t even read the blurb ha. But while I say the covers are perfection, the story inside is even better. A level of creepy that chills you to your childhood campfire story days.