Review: The Headsman by Cristina Mîrzoi

Posted May 13, 2022 by Stephanie in 5 Stars, Review / 3 Comments

Title: The Headsman
Author: Cristina Mîrzoi
Publication: January 14, 2022
Genre: Dark Fiction
Find it on: Amazon
Rating: 5/5★

Take a glimpse into the world of a headsman, a gloomy village in which each dweller has a secret: an evil witch, a shrewd florist, a naive young man, a foreign merchant, a dreadful husband, a mischievous maid, and a lustful duke. These stories are intertwined, weaving a dark narrative of love, trickery, brutality, and loss.

Under the bleak aesthetic, raw human emotions unravel themselves in a gripping story about moral decay. In a world that belongs to the wicked, how far can one walk this path while keeping a clean conscience?

The Headsman is a collection of short stories that focus on interconnected characters, sometimes looking at the same event from a different perspective. As a genre, it falls somewhere under dark fiction territory.

 

The Headsman by Cristina Mîrzoi is a collection of short stories that are all intertwined together. The stories are all centered around a village where characters like a merchant, a duke, a maid, a supposed witch and more get to shine a light on their point of view in different chapters. The book was beautifully written, reminiscent of dark fairy tales with twisty revelations and a gloomy atmosphere.

This book has turned out to be the most surprising find of the year so far. I hadn’t expected to love it as much as I did which only made me that more in awe of the stories and the author. I love dark stories, fairy tales, folklore and anything in between so I completely devoured every word of this book. It was brilliant in its writing, themes and how all the stories were connected. I read one chapter and completely changed my mind about the character and their situation in another chapter entirely.

I literally couldn’t read enough pages of this book but at the same time I also wanted to slow down because I wanted to savor everything. There are only 48 pages but every single word in it counted and was often relevant to other stories. I would honestly love to read more stories or maybe even a full novel set in this dark medieval-esque world because those short 48 pages were that compelling and stunning to read. I’d highly recommend it and it can be easily read in one sitting. I’m sure fans of dark fiction won’t be disappointed!

About the author:

Cristina is a writer from Romania. She has a bachelor’s degree in Communication and an MA in Religious Studies, with a dissertation on Divination in Classical Antiquity.

She grew up reading fairy tales and Greek mythology, her favourite author is Ray Bradbury, and she is captivated by Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

Her writing career began in 2019 when she started working on a children’s fantasy novel in Romanian, her native language,”Prințesa și Pricoliciul”, published in May 2022. She continued writing flash fiction horror pieces in English for US based e-zines; her work has been published in Sirens Call Publications. “The Headsman” is a short story collection in English available on Amazon.

She is currently working on a dark fantasy novella in English.

Read more on Instagram @cristina_mirzoi

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