Title: Enter At Your Own Risk!
Author: Timothy R. Bartlett
Publisher: Westwood Books Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 978-1643613789
Pages: 398
Genre: Fiction, Short Stories
Reviewed by: Jennifer Weiss

Read Book Review

Enter At Your Own Risk! is a collection of 56 short stories, readers will find anecdotes ranging from Westerns to Fantasy and everything in between. The idea of these stories is to explore the farthest reaches of the mind, to expand the imagination and see what one mind can come up with when left uninhibited. This collection is great to bring to picnics, campfires, sitting at the doctor’s office because you can finish a story and set the book aside and not lose your place or forget what has already happened in the story. Readers of all ages are in for an adventure when they open this book and step through the “Forest Tree Doorway.”

The book does come with a warning informing readers that some of the stories have strong language and settings that one may find disturbing. This actually helps prepare the reader for anything that might be difficult for them to read and allows them to decide if they want to continue reading or not. Author Timothy R. Bartlett wants his readers to experience every aspect of the story, every sensation and emotion, so he describes each setting in great detail allowing the reader to fully imagine themselves in the story itself. One would almost want the author to describe sounds more than simply saying what the sounds are such as “a whooshing sound,” but this allows the reader to know exactly what he is envisioning with his story.

Some stories such as “The Oddities” lead the readers to believe one thing only to have a small twist at the end; this particular story garnishes a small chuckle from the reader once they realize what the cowboy was experiencing. The stories are fun and jovial to read allowing the reader to take a break from the stress of daily life and escape even if it is for a few minutes to read one story. This is a collection which helps the reader to turn off their daily activity situations for a moment and allow creative thought to take over. There is so much creativity and potential for more within these stories – one wonders if the author could expand on some and make them into longer novels.

Readers who enjoy short stories would definitely find this book entertaining and delightful. There are some situations in which some readers may not prefer to read, but because this is a collection of short stories, one could skip the stories with bad language and disturbing scenes and not miss anything! Overall this assortment of stories was pleasurable to read and satisfies the insatiable appetite of a bookworm’s need to read.