Violent Delights

Short Story by Harry Shannon
Read for Tales to Terrify #53 by Joe Sammarco

Shakespeare-based titles are done-to-death in Science Fiction and Fantasy but I haven't seen that many in Horror.  Horror seems more the genre for Samuel Taylor Coleridge or assorted fairy tale references, but I'm surprised we haven't seen more focus on the dark aspects of The Bard.  Sadly, we don't get any of that here either, just a flurry of Shakespeare references toward the end that is fairly clever, if not particularly interesting.

For the most part, this is just a story of  a man dying and being annoyed by the girl who hit him with her car and refuses to save him, preferring to cover up her crime by disposing of the body instead.  It drags on a bit, I keep expecting the protagonist to die and he just keeps dragging on.  The very last lines were good, but would have been nice if we'd gotten to them faster.  And if the Shakespeare connection had seemed less trivial.

I'm also not sure why the protagonist has to be a horror writer, it comes across as a bit of cliché without adding anything to the story.  It gives a lot of time for the protagonist to focus on his regrets about dying and his overly-disgraced career, but almost nothing about the absurdity of committing murder to avoid a DUI arrest.

2.5 Shakespeare quotes out of 5.