Book Review: Lore by Aaron Mahnke

We're well into the spooky season, so it's time to break out the scary stuff! This is actually a book I picked up around Christmas in anticipation of having something chilling to read for Halloween. And it's...okay.

Lore is a written collection from Mahnke's podcast of the same name. And it reads like it, too. You can hear Mahnke reading these words in a faux-NPR cadence (note: I've never heard the podcast but I guarantee that's what it sounds like), but it doesn't totally translate to the written word.

Some of the stories in here are interesting - like the cave full of skeletons of three-foot-tall humans (!) - but I'd love to see some footnotes to make sure this isn't a somebody-said-this or, more ominously, I-read-this-online; however, there's nowhere in a podcast to put footnotes, and this book follows suit. So you can take the stories at face value, or not.

Yes, a few of these stories were frightening, but not enough to recommend - five out of ten hot dogs.