AMoRaR Book Review: When Your Heart is a Broken Thing

A Month of Rain and Reads Reviews3 months ago4 min readAdd comment

Welcome to A Month of Rain and Reads, a celebration of self-published and indie SFF throughout the entire month of November. To find out how you can take part and view the whole list of content, visit our introduction post.

This is a guest review for When Your Heart is a Broken Thing by Helen Whistberry as written by Karen Lykkebo.

A lonely man shunned by society and haunted by a beautiful corpse. Sentient toys in a life and death struggle with unspeakable evil. Spectral visitations at midnight and in broad daylight. Fairy and folk tale re-imaginings full of eldritch places and events. Glimpses of the future and reminiscences of times past and times that never were and never will be. This generous selection of short stories encompasses genres from folk horror to dystopian sci fi, animal fantasy to ghost tales.

Enter the imagination of Helen Whistberry and enjoy 19 unforgettable stories with the author’s signature mix of horror and hope. Includes 20 original illustrations by the author.

Horror is a diverse genre and this short story collection showcases that brilliantly. With 19 stories all of various subgenres of spec-fic (gothic and dark fantasy, fairytale and folklore retellings, dystopian sci-fi), they all have elements of horror from slow, looming vibes to ominous endings.

I really enjoyed the fairytale and folklore section (I’m a sucker for folklore so not really surprised) and what Helen really excels at is catching the vibe of old-timey fairytales. It felt like reading original Grimm and HC Andersen with new dark twist. They’re ominous, creatures are tricksters, and somewhere there’s some obscure moral we don’t want to think too much about. I really like Helen’s ability to bring sentience to everything and smoothly break the fourth wall in her stories. I don’t think we see that often in modern stories anymore. Again a quality that brought me back to sitting in front of the fireplace while my grandma would read aloud from her book of fairytales (the very non-disney kind).

My favorite stories were Cinderella from the perspective of her faithful mice and the surprisingly haunting origin story of the song “Cotton-Eyed Joe”. Of the sci-fi section, “The Guard” absolutely gave me goosebumps, and “Eyes, Shining in the Night” at the beginning of the collection was a brilliant paranormal story!

The collection has an overall sensation of nostalgia and grief. Like a reminiscent of things lost and changing times. It comes in regrettable decisions, longings of what was, and the bitter acceptance that we can’t go back and change the past even with all of our good intentions. Helen’s writing is descriptive and alive and weaves in the fantastical and the real seamlessly.

With 19 stories (reading time between 5 and 45 min) there’s a little bit for everyone and it makes for an enjoyable palette cleanser between novels. It contains original artwork in between each story so if you’re generally a paperback reader, I’d definitely get the physical copy of this.

About the Guest Reviewer

Karen Lykkebo writes (dark) fantasy drenched in despair, love, and – occasionally – hope. She’s the author of The Palace of Winds trilogy and Heir to The Sun and has several horror short stories under her name.

A former marine biologist turned physiotherapist her writing is inspired by nature and her personal struggles with her body and mind. Born and raised in Scandinavia, she loves the deep misty woods and long summer evenings and draw on ancient lore of the north for her stories. When she’s not writing, she’s entertaining her two lively cats or is getting lost in the woods.