Shudder with eerie delight as you sink your teeth into and feast upon the horrifying stories and imagery awaiting you in PORTRAITS OF DARK THINGS. Craig Bowers' soul-chilling anthology delivers fifteen bite-sized tales for every taste-from accounts of a revived rampaging beast and a legendary chant that summons a murderous hag to a spectral bride-to-be hellbent on revenge. Savor them one at a time, or all in one sitting... if you dare.

Hmmmmm this blurb makes the book out to be so much more than it actually was.

Full of interesting and intriguing excerpts of haunted houses or scary characters the book really is just an outline of these things rather than an actual collection of short stories or tales.

Lacking in depth and detail I found it read more like a catalogue of story blurbs than actual stories. A shame really as some of the characters etc were pretty spooky and the illustrations were brilliant.

This is a cute cute for middle school aged kids that may be a little mature and like creepy/spooky stories. The stories are short and to the point and the illustrations are actually really great. It would make a great read during the spooky season for a parent and child read. My only hang up is that the stories could have been a little more detailed and longer.

Portraits of Dark Things sounded so promising but it was sadly lacking, none of the stories really made much sense as they had no structure or depth, it was reminiscent of campfire stories told to scare the listeners but unfortunately didn't and I fgave up half way through.

I enjoyed this book so much. The writing felt like I was listening to a podcast. This book would be amazing as an audiobook.
The stories here were short and scary. They reminded me a lot of goosebumps and the scary stories to tell in the dark.
I will be looking forward to reading more from this author.

I really enjoyed Portraits of Dark Things. I enjoyed the stories and the art - oh, how awesome the art is! Portraits of Dark Things brought me back to the days of Goosebumps and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Essentially, Portraits of Dark Things is the perfect addition to the horror lover starter pack. I happened to stumble on this book while perusing NetGalley and am so glad that I did! I didn't read it in time for my Spooktober goals, but I will enjoy this title over and over again.

By now you can see I’m a lover of a good ghost story and all things Macabre. So I grabbed this with high hopes for a few good chills on a late night.

I can’t deny Craig Bowers has the skill and I’m sure any novel he produced would be worth the read, but this was a disappointment for me.

Each “story” was just a few lines long, maybe ten tops, and each was written like the haunted places guide books you pick up in the gift shop while on vacation. Though honestly, I’ve read a few of those and they give very detailed descriptions of the lore involved while this didn’t.

The accompanying pictures were creepy in their own right, but couples with a few lines of the story was a waste.

Thanks to @Netgalley, BooksGoSocial, and Craig Bowers for this eArc in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion

Not really creepy, and the writing was without emotion or passion. The pictures were alright, but I expected more from the cover. Overall, not very good.

As a kid, I used to read a lot of scary story anthologies, so I was really looking forward to this one.

The Haunting of Abernathy Hall
I can't say much because this is three paragraphs and a picture. "They say there's a ghost here and he throws stuff at people who say bad things about him."
That's it. There's no story to this one at all.

The Ghost Girl of Ghostville
There's the ghost of a girl in an old farmhouse. She scares people around sometimes.
And I don't mean we see that happen in the story. The story is four paragraphs. It just tells us that she disturbs people sometimes and doesn't show us anything.

Doctor Bloody Black Bones
Again, it was three paragraphs and a picture. At this point in reading I was pretty resolved to the fact that I wouldn't actually be reading any stories, just short descriptions of a creepy thing.
But there are no stakes. There aren't any characters in danger. These 'stories' are more like reading a blurb for a book. They're "an idea for a story", not an actual story.

I'm skipping some because I only have the same thing to say about them. They're like "a list of ghouls" instead of actual tales.

I liked "Rotten Head" for what it was. This one had an actual tale with characters in it, and rose above the others immediately because of that.
"Dead Sugar" was one of the better ones for the same reason.

I was hoping to read a series of short stories, but if I were to classify this I would say it's more like a list of ghosts or hauntings. There are only a few paragraphs for each one, and not too much information. The best ones are the longer ones, but even those are maybe a page or a page and a half.

What I would recommend the author do is take a few of the fiends listed and flesh out stories around them. Don't tell us, "They disturb the neighbors sometimes". Tell us how they did. Who did they disturb? Did a child wake up late one night to go to the bathroom and end up hearing something next door? Did someone's animal refuse to go on a property? Who were they? Why were they in the area? What was it that happened?

Flesh out some characters and a tale of what happened to them. The author has a list of fiends to work with here, so pick a few and really put us into the setting so that we can see what happened and why it was scary.

(I didn't pick a rating on Goodreads, but Netgalley requires choosing a rating, and I don't think I got what I was hoping for from the summary. I hope the author takes some time to expand on some of these.)

More of a tell and not show book. I was never creeped out, the art never made me feel paranoid, and in general I just didn't feel scared. There are a couple of stories in it that I would love expanded upon, but I doubt they will be.

I really enjoyed reading each story. The illustrations are also really well done and I loved how each story had a picture to help the reader imagine the character better.

My personal favourite story was Rotten Head out of all of them. I really liked how it had more of a creepy factor to the story with him but also quite sad as well.

A great quick read with awesome illustrations of nice short creepy stories for everyone to devour on a nice, chilly, dark night.

Quick read of supposed folklore and other spectral tales. A little too simplistically written for most middle school readers, and probably too gruesome for the even younger set.

Portraits of Dark Things: A Collection of Ghastly Tales and Haunting Images by Craig A. Bowers was received directly from the publisher and I chose to review it. I am not sure if this is Craigs first, very short novella, but I will be looking out for this author. The stores were interesting and spooky enough to keep me interested, though the book was, as mentioned, very short. If you want to buy a novella, with pictures, to share with hardcore children, friends or neighbors, this may be a quick read to start with.

4 stars