Midnight Grinding and Other Twilight Terrors / Ronald Kelly Cemetery Dance / February 2009 Reviewed by: Publishers Weekly

The 32 tales in Kelly's debut collection are chock-full of weird cults, vampires, mutant monsters, and other stock props of generic horror fiction. “Breakfast Serial” and “Yea, Though I Drive” are biter-bit stories in which vagabond psychopaths with murder on their minds are undone by the victims they stalk. In “The Web of La Sanguinaire”, an arachnologist pursing an overgrown species of spider becomes the ultimate sacrifice to his studies when the creatures show an unanticipated talent for turning the tables.

Kelly, a stalwart presence from the horror paperback-original market of the 1990's, writes stories that, for the most part, show a workmanlike zeal; after setting up a simple premise, they proceed methodically to eerie finales prepared by a few well-timed shocks and plot twists. Short on atmosphere and simple in their telling, they nevertheless deliver their share of thrills and chills.