Shadows & Tall Trees, Issue 6, Spring 2014

Shadows & Tall Trees #6

by Michael Kelly (Editor), Robert Levy, Robert Shearman

Shadows & Tall Trees is annual anthology of exceptional literary merit, showcasing the best new writers of contemporary weird fiction and strange tales. In 2010 and 2013 the journal was a finalist for the British Fantasy Award for Best Periodical/Magazine. Featuring notable visionaries including Robert Shearman, Steve Rasnic Tem, Alison Moore, Nicholas Royle, and Nina Allan, the stories published in Shadows & Tall Trees have been selected for reprint in The Best Horror of the Year, The Best British Stories, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing, The Year's Best Australian Fantasy & Horror, and Wilde Stories: The Best Gay Speculative Fiction.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Weird Fiction, Anthologies

248 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 15, 2014

About the author

Michael Kelly is the Series Editor for the Year's Best Weird Fiction, and author of Undertow and Other Laments, and Scratching the Surface; as well as co-author of the novel Ouroboros.

His short fiction has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including All Hallows, Best New Horror, Black Static, Dark Arts, the Hint Fiction Anthology, PostScripts, Space & Time, Supernatural Tales, Tesseracts 13, and Weird Fiction Review.

Michael is a World Fantasy Award, Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award Nominee.

Reviews

[James Everington · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a lot of anthologies these days with titles like "Year's Best Horror..." etc.

'Shadows & Tall Trees 6' isn't called such a thing, but it might as well be. A stunning collection of stories, with not a bad one among the bunch. Intelligent, well-written, original horror fiction and (along with the editor's introduction) a passionate manifesto for horror fiction in the short form.

Superb.

[Justin Steele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shadows & Tall Trees is the premiere journal for weird fiction. Editor Michael Kelly never fails to combine a stellar lineup of stories exploring the liminal and strange. The most recent volume, Issue 6, is special in more ways than one. It is the first Shadows & Tall Trees to be released since Undertow became an imprint of ChiZine Publications. It also marks the series growing from a smaller journal format to a full blown anthology, containing seventeen stories. This volume is also dedicated to Joel Lane, one of the finest practitioners in the genre, who tragically left us last year.

Kelly has far exceeded expectations, putting together an exceptional volume at a much larger length, alleviating the reader's fear that the larger length would lessen the overall quality by including filler stories.

Some highlights include:

Michael Wehunt's Onanon is a really creepy story about a man, his sickly old mother, and a mysterious girl. The man's search for identity and who is mother truly was are intertwined with the girl he begins a sort of affair with. The story builds to quite a disturbing conclusion.

Hidden in the Alphabet by Charles Wilkinson has an old, once-controversial filmmaker attempting to meet his long estranged and thought dead son, a meeting set up by his niece, who was once an actress in his films. There is a sense of great wrongdoing in the director's past, as he used his son and niece in ways that were utterly wrong, and a current sense of justice being enacted on the director.

Kaaron Warren's Death Door Cafe is about dying people given a second chance, and what they are willing to sacrifice of themselves for that chance. The setting is a secretive cafe, which is only known from word of mouth, where the dying go to see if they are worthy. The story is melancholic and beautiful, another great story from an excellent writer.

Road Dead is a really short story about four young guys going for a drive in order to find cellphone reception, when one of them decides to take a detour. F. Brett Cox manages to pull off a creepy little story that reads like some rattling off a story about a dream they had.

V.H. Leslie's The Quiet Room is a tale of grief and family. A father gains full custody of his daughter after her mother dies, and they move into a big old house. As the man is trying to adjust to being a full time father of a teenager, his daughter takes a turn for the strange, becoming quiet and withdrawn, seemingly obsessed with a dusty, old piano, on which she keeps the urn of her mother's ashes. Leslie paints a convincing portrait of the father and his daughter, and there is a sense of dread permeating throughout the piece.

R.B. Russell is mainly known for running Tartarus Press, an excellent British publisher of weird fiction, but he is quite an author as well. Night Porter takes a premise that seems like it's straight out of a mainstream horror flick: a young girl takes a job as a hotel's night porter, and her job soon takes a turn for the horrific. Russell takes this premise and veers it straight into weird territory, creating an excellent horror story that I enjoyed very much.

Shaddertown by Conrad Williams reminds me of much of Ramsey Campbell's modern fiction. In Holes for Faces many of Ramsey Campbell's stories featured either elderly characters, or children, and sometimes both, playing on their similarities and differences. These stories are often fraught with anxiety so powerfully written that the readers begins to feel it themselves. This is very much what Williams has done with this story, which follows a grandmother with breathing problems (cigarettes get you every time) who decides to take her grandson out on a tour of some underground tunnels. The anxiety the old woman feels is palpable, and Williams executes this like a master.

Christopher Harman's Apple Pie and Sulphur was an great story that was bursting with dread. A trio of old hiking buddies get together for a last hike before two of them move away, and due to a full train take a walking detour through a mysterious wood. They stumble on some creepy abandoned places before finding a small inn/restaurant seemingly in the middle of nowhere. At this point Harman takes the gloves off and the story quickly veers into nightmare territory. Harman excelled at creating a surreal atmosphere, as the remaining protagonist seemed trapped in an almost limbo-like version of town, not knowing what was real and what was hallucination. The dread builds and builds, although the ending doesn't quite live up to it. Overall a very impressive story.

Summerside by Alison Moore explores the liminal strangeness of a certain house when a new girl moves in.

The Space Between is co-authored by Ray Cluley and Ralph Robert Moore, and is one of my favorite stories in the anthology. The authors do an excellent job displaying the hopelessness and despair of their main character. A man loses his swanky job, forcing him and his wife to move into a cheap apartment in an old boarding house until they can get back on their feet. A small door leads to a storage area and into crawlspaces around the house, and this soon becomes the man's escape outlet. Things get murkier and murkier the more obsessed with the crawlspaces and neighbors the man becomes, as he gets bolder and bolder in his travels through the walls. It's a chilling look into voyeurism, and how low someone can fall.

C.M. Muller's Vrangr is a short, eerie tale of a man inheriting an old property from a relative he doesn't even know. He has strange dreams and an affinity for the past, but decides to head to the old house and see what his inheritance is all about. I am familiar with Muller as a blogger and reviewer, and this was the first piece of his fiction that I have read, and it left me rather impressed. From reading the story it is clear that Muller knows his weird fiction, and has the skills to craft a rather numinous tale. I look forward to reading more of his work in the future.

The anthology closes with the wonderful Writings Found in a Red Notebook. I have long been a sucker for the "found notebook" style of stories (although I've so far been mixed about found footage films) as is apparent from two of the stories I chose to publish in Children of Old Leech. David Surface knocks it out of the park with this story, and sustains an intense feeling of dread that builds up right until the climax. When a troubled couple take a detour on a long drive through the desert, they awake lost and confused. Obviously, things get worse. It's an intense, terrifying story, and is enough for me to look for more of Surface's fiction.

2014 is a good year for weird fiction. Shadows & Tall Trees grows to anthology length, and knocks it out of the park, and Kelly's Undertow Publications is publishing the first volume of The Year's Best Weird Fiction edited by Laird Barron.

[Ross Warren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another cracking issue, now expanded to anthology length. Stand out stories were Shaddertown by Conrad Williams, Death's Door Cafe by Kaaron Warren, Apple Pie and Sulphur by Christopher Harman, Night Porter by R.B.Russell, The Space Between by Moore and Cluley and, my favourite of the collection, The Quiet Room by V.H. Leslie. The 2015 volume can't come soon enough.

[Rebecca Lloyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

REVIEW OF SHADOWS AND TALL TREES ANTHOLOGY 6.
What I always dread when reading dark stories is that I’ll be confronted with the true horror in fiction writing – clichés. So it was great not to be waylaid by any amongst the sixteen strange tales in this anthology. There are haunted houses, to be sure, but they don’t count as clichés here, and especially not in Alison Moore’s Summerside, a story with an intriguing atmosphere and some skilful dialogue between house owner and tenant. In fact so competently and delicately does Alison handle the material that she has created a decent spooky house in just a few sentences. Houses are the settings for other stories in the collection and one in particular The Space Between by Ralph Robert Moore and Ray Cluley is striking. I smiled at ‘…old fashioned tub with a plastic shower curtain celebrating goldfish’ – I can just see that abject thing. This story becomes more interesting by the minute and so I was able to overcome my dislike of the use of unfinished note-like sentences as a writing style, and the story does turn out to be original and unusual with some clever use of dialogue to evoke mood and feeling. Another original story idea was The Statue by Myriam Frey, in which the supposedly innocent and playful behaviour of a man pretending to be a statue turns very creepy, very quickly. An equally interesting premise is Death’s Door Café by Kaaron Warren, a fond story and slightly wistfully told. Writings found in a Red Notebook by David Surface is also a well told story in which two vulnerable young people become frighteningly lost in a featureless landscape. Written in the form of a diary, the entries begin in a calm and matter of fact manner, but quickly become more and more alarming as the two realise their predicament. Perhaps the most original of all these stories, at least in that the story is conveyed to the reader in a wonderfully unique way, is the very cleverly written To Assume the Writer's Crown: Notes on the Craft by Eric Schaller. It begins in quite a rye manner in the form of an essay but quickly enough became deeply macabre as both its [real] meaning and where the reader is in relation to the author unfolds.
Ideally each story in an anthology should be strong both in terms of the originality of the story idea and in the style of its telling, but it is rare to find the two together. So also in this anthology in which some stories are terrific ideas but style and language use had not been in the forefront of the writer’s mind. Yet the purposeful use of language is very evident in other stories, for example Onanon by Michael Welmut. This is a remarkably strange story which I couldn’t possibly describe. I thought about it for a while and decided it didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand all of it, just as you don’t have to examine the individual brush strokes in an impressionist painting and hope to understand it that way, so also, I felt the same for Onanon and was in the end happy to have been touched by the story. I loved this sentence:- ‘the words felt ill, somehow, concerned as they were with some implied creature on the periphery of the page.’ Thinking about style still, while again I wasn’t able to fully understand Road Dead by F Brett Cox, the slightly breathless tone of the story created by the use of short sentences and the lack of direct dialogue creates the mood and suits the subject matter.
For me, Shaddertown by Conrad Williams was particularly admirable. It is a powerfully written story full of fascinating imagery and tender humour and written with brilliant energy and perfect command of language. I noted a couple of other stories that were stylishly written. One was C. M Mukers Vranger, the sudden and alarming ending of which I had to read twice before I thought I knew what it meant. Another was The Vault of the Sky, the Face of the Deep, by Robert Levy, a sombre dignified story, elegantly rendered. I thought also that Apple Pie and Sulphur by Christopher Harman was written in a thoughtful way. At one point in this very long story, I was slightly reminded of the work of Robert Aickman. I particularly loved this:- ‘Sheep watched them approach, their faces stupidly noble, before prancing away under bouncing burdens of ragged wool.’ While I was less interested in the storyline, this story did have some excellent descriptive passages.
Thinking now about sheer creepiness, It Flows from the Mouth by Robert Shearman is wonderful in its strangeness, a story plainly but very fluently written. This story gets steadily weirder, but not because anything extraordinary happens for a long time, but because you sense that Shearman is leading you somewhere very deliberately, [and you trust him to get you there] – then the story gets very strange indeed. By contrast perhaps, The Golem of Leopoldstadt by Tara Isabella Burton has a particular kind of terror in it right from the first word. This is a dramatic and tense story written economically and boldly.
The choice of the present tense in Hidden in the Alphabet by Charles Wilkinson, gives this story a curious detached feeling that suits it well. It was quite like watching a film and the pace of it was intriguing. This is a subtle gruesome story, stylishly written. I liked this description of a boy as having ‘…enormous blue eyes but with a sort of shivery sensitivity that was irritating, like a pedigree dog that had been badly inbred.’
I’m always pleased to find well written dialogue and V.H. Leslie’s fairly traditional ghost story, The Quiet Room, not only has a good scary moment early on that notches up the tension, but has a convincing scene between a teenage girl and her father with solid dialogue. The father’s hesitation about how he approaches his daughter sounds true to real life and V’s mature writing style is a pleasure to read.
Apart from having a good story to tell and a stylish way of telling it, the settings in dark fiction are very often an important element. R.B Russell’s The Night Porter is a story set in a slightly odd small hotel with Marianne, an avid reader employed as a night porter, who gets tied up with a curious character, a Miss Fisher, and as the story develops it becomes increasingly tense and weird.
Altogether, this anthology has some good chunky stories on offer, and some writers’ names to watch out for in the future. It was my pleasure to be able to read them and leave this review.
Rebecca Lloyd

[Ronald · Rating 4 out of 5]

My average rating for the stories in this book comes out to 3.58, thus rounding up to 4 stars.

My review of the stories can be read in this thread, posts 51 to 70:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Joe Gola · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice, diverse selection of spooky/weird stories. The writing is solid all around, and the subjects move well beyond the basic fare of scratches at the window and thumps under the bed. My favorites were Robert Shearman's deeply weird "It Flows From the Mouth," "Summerside" by Alison Moore, and Michael Wehunt's "Onanon" which was without question the strangest and most gleefully surreal piece in the collection. The scariest,, however, was a good-old-fashioned haunted-house story by V.H. Leslie called "The Quiet Room"; the fact that it made me jumpy was a pretty impressive feat, as I was reading it outside in the middle of the day.

One thing did strike me, though—and I would call this more of an observation than a criticism—which was that the likable characters seemed few and far between in the anthology. It's possible that that is just the nature of these types of tales; dark things happen, and somehow it seems fitting that they happen to dark people; that is how we make sense of the world. In other cases, the characters are not so much offensive as they are painfully limited—isolated or abandoned types who finally step outside their private shelter only to find the world to be stranger, harsher and more dangerous than they had imagined. Maybe the latter is a reflection of writers' own bookish personalities, or maybe it's just easier to send your characters to their doom if they're a bit obstinate and aren't texting with a collection of upbeat and levelheaded friends who advise them to please, just go to a regular amusement park and not the abandoned one on the outskirts of town where all those children disappeared.

I mention all that not to suggest that there's anything wrong with the anthology—because I do think it is very good—but maybe just as a reminder to myself and other writers that jerks and introverts make it easy to manufacture drama but they're not really the most fun people to hang around.

[Tantra Bensko · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite anthologies ever. I felt so fortunate the whole time reading it, knowing there was more to read, seeing it lying around, picking it up. It just creates a huge sense of pleasure for me, which is odd, I suppose, for something exploring darker, difficult, sometimes topics that veer towards Literary Horror in these Weird Tales and Strange Tales. I don't literally seek out being viscerally scared by a book, but something more subtly profound and beautiful,and the stories in this anthology brought me that nearly consistently.

I have great respect for editor Michael Kelly and Undertow Press, which is an imprint of ChiZine, who put out this book, with attention to making even the cover the most sumptuous silky material which is a sensual to touch, and choosing powerful cover art by Santiago Caruso.

The story that haunts me most even after finishing the book awhile back is "The Space Between," by Ralph Robert Moore and Ray Cluley. I felt as if I had dreamed it, and wondered why I hadn't, or if I had, in some way, by reading it, making it feel so real. They say successful literary fiction makes changes in our physiology for weeks as we identify vicariously with the protagonists. Our bodies thinks we lived it. Well, I have that sensation, and am glad for it.

I don't think I've ever spent as much time with all the writers' bios at the back of a book after reading each story. These authors are reaching the world in a big way across major publications, and we are better for their presence.

Big congratulations to all involved, and 100 percent recommendations to anyone considering reading it who enjoys ambiguity, the discomforting edge between the normal world and the hard-to-explain which is so common in so many sane people's lives, if they are so bold as to admit it.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

This sixth entry to the set really shows off weird liminal spaces and unsettling hauntings in the corners of your eyes. “To Assume the Writer's Crown: Notes on the Craft” by Eric Schaller is a fun post-modern deconstruction of writing that approaches “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story.” “The Quiet Room” by V. H. Leslie has an excellent haunting with a heartbreaking relationship between a daughter and her estranged and recently widowed father.

[Lou Sytsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

With this volume Mike Kelly has moved his anthology to a yearly release and the first one jumps out of the gate and hits the ground running.

The S&T line of horror collections focus on the more literate and slow burn style of story telling. Each release has done an admirable job with an attendant increase in quality as Mike Kelly's work in putting these collections out has gathered more attention and critical acclaim.

This volume continues the trend and hits new highs. The same introspective style of writing that is the trademark of this fiction line has been collected in this volume but never has the story telling been this accessible and emotionally engaging.

I really enjoyed this book, treasured each story, and was truly sad when the last page had been read.

Excellent collection. The bar continues to be raised and I can't wait for the 2015 edition!

[Gordon White · Rating 5 out of 5]

All around excellet collection of dark fiction. Tends towards understated and unsettling rather than gruesome and gory, but a fine collection. Highlights include “Onanon,” “The Quiet Room,” “The Space Between,” and “Writings Found in a Red Notebook.” My full review was posted online at Hellnotes (http://hellnotes.com/shadows-and-tall...).

[Chris Riley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great read--a true representation of the weird and dark in literature. Michael Wehunt's "Onanon" took the blue ribbon, in my opinion. Looking forward to future issues.

[S.B. (Beauty in Ruins) · Rating 3 out of 5]

While many of the stories are more vignettes or atmospheric character pieces than traditional narratives, Shadows & Tall Trees 2014 fits the bill of 'weird' fiction very nicely. A couple stories fell flat, but those that did work for me had a definite Rod Serling / Edgar Allen Poe feel to them. It's an unusual connection, but Michael Kelly is to be commended for managing such an interesting gathering.

The collection starts with a fantastic non-fiction piece, To Assume the Writer’s Crown: Notes on the Craft, by Eric Schaller. It's a piece that's of particular interest to aspiring authors, with my favorite section being the one on revision, with strategies such as a Kingectomy, Straubing, and Flauberation.

Onanon was an great opening story, with Michael Wehunt putting a different sort of twist on vampire mythology. It Flows From the Mouth is the first of many ghost stories in the collection, although Robert Shearman focuses more on the ghost that haunt a relationship than phantom apparitions. Hidden in the Alphabet is, by far, the most Poe-like story in the collection, one in which Charles Wilkinson draws out the suspense, while building some nice atmosphere, before dropping the final twist. While that was a definite high point of the collection, Death’s Door Café by Kaaron Warren immediately tops it with a story that had me nodding in appreciation of the way it played out. Following that, Night Porter was a decidedly creepy tale that had me guessing all along, with R.B. Russell delivering a twist that I honestly didn't expect.

While I'm not quite sure what the conclusion hinted at, The Statue was a curious tale by Myriam Frey that jumped right into the weird. Shaddertown presents a similar sort of situation with an ambiguous ending, but Conrad Williams spun a wonderfully hypnotic tale that seemed to be heading one way, then took a much darker turn with some fantastic atmosphere. Apple Pie and Sulphur started out strong, but it felt like Christopher Harman stretched it out a bit too long, telegraphing the destination, and then making us wait while he indulged in the journey. Summerside and The Space Between were nicely paired together, stories about strange houses, with Alison Moore exploring the ghosts within the walls and Ralph Robert Moore & Ray Cluley literally exploring the walls of madness. Writings Found in a Red Notebook was an odd choice with which to wrap up the collection, with David Surface delivering a very classic sort of found footage horror story of survival, but I really liked it.

An unusual collection, no doubt about it, more weird and atmospheric than scary or unsettling, Shadows & Tall Trees 2014 is a publication I'm sure you'll be hearing more about, with some authors I'm sure will be appearing in some best of anthologies to wrap up the year. Original and unique, it's certainly worth a read.


Originally reviewed at Beauty in Ruins

[Thomas Wüstemann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shadows & Tall Trees was kind of a big deal back when it was still published. At least in terms of quality, it had a good reputation. Of course, it's easier for a yearly publication to have some high-quality submissions than it is for a monthly or quarterly magazine, but the stories within this 6th volume still show a good hand on the editor's side to hold a certain level of prose.
Unfortunately, this comes a bit at the cost of variety. While most of the stories are a good read, there's also not a lot of experimentation or something truly outstanding. What I noticed in comparison to other magazines is that the authors here are mostly nailing the endings. This is where a lot of short stories fall flat, be it because they try to reach a great twist and fail or that it just ends nowhere. Here, nearly every story makes sense and gives something meaningful to the reader. When I am giving this just 3 stars, it is solely because of the lack of originality.
Particularly striking stories for me were THE QUIET ROOM, a moody ghost story about grieving and letting loose, NIGHT PORTER, a creepy semi-vampire story that gives great nuances to our main character and her fascination for the portrayed evil, and THE SPACE BETWEEN, an all too real story about getting lost in fantasies.
Shadows & Tall Trees Volume 6 was a great read, and I am looking forward to reading more of the series.

[Stewart Horn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love short horror fiction. I read lots of it: magazines, ezines, collections, anthologies and single stories, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a book quite like this one.

Editor Michael Kelly obviously likes a certain kind of horror: contemporary, literary, subtle and undefined. There are no zombies, no vampires, no chainsaw-wielding psychopaths. Instead there are expertly drawn characters dealing with terrible things.

There are two main things that make this book special, compared to other anthologies I’ve read lately.

I’ve mentioned the lack of traditional monsters, but it seemed that all the characters here are all dealing with their own ghosts, either unresolved episodes from their past or some inner demon that becomes apparent in the story. Even when there is some outside agency it’s the characters’ action or flaws that attract them. It’s almost Shakespearian.

None of the stories resolve in a satisfactory way. I don’t mean that as a flaw, quite the opposite. Every story here leaves you guessing, either about what actually happened or how we should feel about it. This apparently simple technique means that we keep thinking about the stories after we’ve finished them. I imagine Michael Kelly writing back to some contributors saying See that bit at the end when the monster appears and explains everything – cut that and we’ve got a deal.

Horror fiction can work on many levels. I think of them as

Jump/ yuck,
suspense,
creepy (glancing behind you while reading),
making you re-examine how you live your life.

Several of these stories work on that last level, the rarest and most effective of all.

It begins by deliberately unsettling the reader with Eric Schaller’s To Assume the Writer’s Crown: Notes on the Craft. This could be read several ways: as a genuine essay with a good dose of the author’s dark humour thrown in, or as a story told by someone who actually has a girl chained up in his basement just so he can write a good story about it, or a meditation on a writer’s relationship with his characters. I think the ambiguity is entirely deliberate and it makes uncomfortable reading for those of us who regularly use ink as a murder weapon.

And the book continues in that vein. The other pieces are more obviously stories, but that feeling of never knowing what’s going on remains throughout. I enjoyed every story in this book. Seriously, there wasn’t a single piece that I would have cut, but here I’ll only specifically mention my favourites.

Onanon by Michael Wehunt. This might be based on a genuine Scandinavian folk tale I haven’t heard, or it’s just so well told it seems real. Three strands of unpleasantness converge into something disturbing.

Death’s Door Cafe by Kaaron Warren. Taking a cliché and making it literal lets us explore morbidity in a story that seems upbeat but undercuts it and needles the reader.

H. Leslie’s The Quiet Room is about your past coming to get you. A house likes silence, so you can better hear the hollowness of your life.

Shaddertown by Conrad Williams is an apparently simple story that somehow encapsulates everything that modern western adults are afraid of in real life.

Ralph Robert Moore and Ray Cluley collaborated to produce The Space Between, in which a man finds he can spy on his neighbours and it becomes a compulsion that ruins his life. I read this as a parable about Facebook and the like but even without that resonant layer it’s a chilling story.

Shadows and Tall Trees is a truly brilliant book, showcasing the most subtle horror fiction currently being written. Go buy it.

[Amar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quality weird fiction in the vein of NIGHTSCRIPT (a younger publication, but one I was introduced to earlier than S&TT)

[E.A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’d been seeing the series Shadows and Tall Trees for a while before I finally purchased a volume at a convention. With a cover like that, how could I resist? The stories are the kind of atmospheric that gets me going—creeping weirdness, the world a little bit off, everything balanced on a knife’s edge between urgent and hypnotic—although the characters or plots didn’t always keep my attention. While I enjoyed the feeling of the stories, I didn’t find very many of them satisfying. I discovered as I made my way through the anthology that I’d read a few of the pieces before, notably the first story, Michael Wehunt’s “Onanon.” (I loved Wehunt’s collection Greener Pastures.) This is the kind of anthology I use to discover writers and seek more of their work, so I can soak up some of that atmosphere when I’m in the mood. This volume has me looking for more from V.H. Leslie and Alison Moore.

[Bryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection of weird/supernatural short fiction that leave more questions than answers. The stories focus on building atmosphere, and the more graphic elements are usually implied instead of described in detail. Standouts for me in the collection include "It Flows from the Mouth" by Robert Shearman, "The Night Porter" by R.B. Russell, "Shaddertown" by Conrad Williams, "Summerside" by Alison Moore and "The Quiet Room" by V.H. Leslie. Great mix of British, American and Canadian writers on display here.

[Renee S. DeCamillis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great stories for the most part, but some are too subtle for my taste. That doesn't mean they are bad, just some are not for me. I'm excited for volume 7!

[Frederic Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some excellent short stories. My favorite was VH Leslie.