A collection of short stories of various genres. Some are mysteries, some slightly fantasy-ish, some romances or literary fiction. A few of these felt a bit pointless to me; the endings offering neither any satisfying conclusion nor adding anything substantial to the plots. Sometimes the ending was so abrupt it made me just go "What?". However, the stories are easy to read and most are slightly strange in a good way. A kind of literary elevator music (meant in the best way).

The stories in The Red Door are quirky, humorous, and eclectic. Many of them are short—less than 1,500 words—in various gripping thrillers, mangled fairy tales, ghastly ghost stories, a horrible horror story, scintillating SciFi, and dark RomComs. K. E. Karl, the author of Our Man in Mbabane, writes light, entertaining tales, and short thrillers with a wry sense of humor. Enjoy!

I really enjoyed the mix of stories. Each one was unique. Will recommend to others.

The Red Door story reminded me of The Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, which I originally adored. Regrettably, the other stories I felt lacked depth and failed to seize me at any point.
An independent review thanks NetGalley / Bowker Paperback

I was looking forward to reading this one but it never seemed to download to my kindle and I wasn't able to renew on the shelf app to read from there instead

Enjoyed reading these short stories but nothing memorable where I would recommend you a friend. Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read this book

After reading the first story, I liked the prose well enough and I thought the characters were well-written, but I was surprised when the end of the chapter came because nothing happened. I gave the second story a shot and it was just reference after reference of old authors and artists that it completely took me out of the story and I wasn't sure what was going on. If sentence structure was an issue, this would have been a 1, but I feel like the author has talent, it just didn't show well in this book.

It was nice to read lots of short stories for a change. There were some I didn't 'get'. Lots of them didn't make much sense to me.

There wasn’t anything particularly special or memorable about this collection of short stories.
The writing was just ok, and they all seemed to end very abruptly. I love a good short story, but just couldn’t seem to get into these.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC!

I enjoyed reading these short stories! My personal favorite has to be 'The Red Door'. I struggled a little bit to stay engaged but the writing was good and the stories had a lot of meaning to them. It may not be everyone's cup of tea but I am fond of short stories so I was able to enjoy them. I liked the language and the humor in the stories; they felt very lively.

I try and do this very rarely but I just couldn’t finish it. The writing was weak, the plots were nonexistent, and you have to have one or the other for a short story to have any punch. DNFed at 45% through.

While I enjoyed most of the short stories in this book, there was nothing that made this book unique. It was a quick easy read (less than 200 pages) but I left wanting more, or wanting something that would make this book stand out and be remembered. The writing style was okay, and on some of the short stories, I felt they were a bit too rushed, but I get it, there is an art to a short story, and unfortunately some of these needed a bit more help.

I do think this book will work for a lot of audiences, just perhaps not for me. While I have not read the other book this author wrote, it sounds like its a much different genre so I can't say whether or not this author just needs more experience in the thriller genre.

Described as a collection of short stories in various genres - I came in with really high hopes.

Unfortunately, the stories themselves didn’t stick out to me. The writing style, though interesting, wasn't exactly my cup of tea. Plus, since all stories were written in the same style, I was finding it really hard to differentiate between them, even when they were supposed to be very different genres.

While I enjoyed the stories in this book, there was nothing about it that truly made it a stand out book to me. It was an enjoyable and easy read, which was nice, and it definitely held my interest, but it isn't necessarily a book that I'm going to be the first in line to purchase. Would I recommend it to others? Sure, if I knew that something like this was what they were looking for. Overall, I decided to give it 3 stars because I did have a nice time reading it, I never found myself struggling to pick it up or get through it, but it did just fall a little bit flat for me.

There is a decent amount of stories in here but none of them ended up being all that memorable to me at all. It would habe been middle of the road to me if I could even remember just one of them.