Licking by J.V. Sadler

This is a solid collection for a debut! There’s a mix of poems and short stories, and the poetry does nicely to break things up and give the reader a bit of a diverse pace.

As a whole, I think the collection lacked a bit of cohesion. Had I not known that it was based around nightmares and dreamscapes, I think I would’ve struggled to come to that conclusion. I didn’t feel that the central theme of the collection came across as well as it could have, and it was hard for me to pull this together as one unit.

The characters felt a little cardboard cutout to me. None of them really got developed enough for me to get into them as characters. In my favourite story of the collection, “Trapped, Chained”, it was extremely unfortunate what happened to Paul and Krin, but I never knew anything about them so I couldn’t feel anything deeper than that initial unfortunateness. Oswald’s motivation for what he did seemed really weak, mostly explained as ‘he did it because he was a white man’, which eh….I need something more than that. He needs more to his character than that for me.

I think Sadler writes really well, and I can see a lot of good things coming from her in the future. ‘Licking’ had a lot of really cool ideas and concepts, and I think it was a very solid start for Sadler. With more experience and polish, I think she could be a real force in the horror industry.