Chaos

When you find out that your new apartment building was built on the site of an old mental hospital, you might be a bit worried. You'd be right to be worried if that mental hospital closed down when that patients and staff slaughtered each other after an administrator accidentally opened a portal to the realm of chaos, as  happened in Mary SanGiovanni's Chaos.

Mary SanGiovanni is a very talented writer, and I think this is one of her best works. It's fast paced. It's weird. It has creepy monsters. There's a fair amount of blood and gore, but not as much as you'd find in the works of many writers. Like many SanGiovanni's books, the plot reminds me of some of the more otherworldly horror of Lovecraft.

The only real problem I have with this book is that it (or my edition anyway) has quite a few formatting issues. The headers, which contain the title and author name, vanish after page 12. The footers, with the page numbers, only appear on pages 1-16, 56-128,  146-148, 160-23, and 249-255. On pages 16 and 147, the text suddenly switches from being double spaced to single spaced for no apparent reason. On one of the unnumbered pages, an entire paragraph is bolded when (as far as I can tell) only the (nonexistent) website HauntedAsylumsofAmerica.com is supposed to be bolded.

Even with those mistakes, which should be fairly easy to correct as this is a self-published, POD book, this is a good read for horror fans.