Tales from the Shadow Booth Volume 4

I would like to thank Dan Coxon for an advance copy of this anthology for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Dan Coxon

Published - Out Now

Price – £8.99 paperback

Welcome to The Shadow Booth, the international journal of weird and eerie fiction…

Well as the nights lengthen and the leaves fall, I find I like my reading to get a little darker.  Not just because soon it’s Halloween but this is also the perfect time to sit alone on the sofa and start to wonder what is outside; or at the top of the stairs or right behind you…right now. Horror is a genre with many flavours but sometimes it’s just great to open a box and find it’s the richest darkest chocolate of stories that are clever, unsettling and uncomfortable.  Tales from the Shadow Booth now in it’s fourth volume edited by Dan Coxon is an absolute delight with a huge collection of fantastically weird and folk horror fiction where you’re never sure what type of story it will be but it’s hard to stop at just reading one

Amongst the stories I enjoyed -

The Devil of Timanfaya by Lucie McKnight Hardy – The collection starts with a bang with this tale of a family arriving for a very middle-class break in Lanzarote.  Tess is the mother dealing with busy kids and husband she realises looks like David Cameron but there is a growing sense of anxiety that some thing is after her.  It’s starts like a black comedy but as the plot unwinds it gets incredibly malevolent and the finale is brilliant ice-cold horror.

The Tribute by James Machin – A man recounts an encounter on a family holiday he barely remembers.  His family in France and an imaginary friend no one really recalls.  This story grows incredibly sinister and pleasingly doesn’t try to explain what is going on.  It’s something weird and nasty that just snaps at you right from under your feet.  Extremely uncomfortable.

The Larpins by Charles Wilkinson – Pierre is minding his sister’s countryside home while they are on holiday.  The local youths known as Larpins as the summer progresses get worse and worse.  This very much has that sense of folk horror where a very urban character is plunged into a wilder and quite crueller world where if you don’t know the rules you could find yourself in deadly danger.  A nasty sense of build up as you start to put the pieces of the village life portrayed together but you may be too late to help anyone…

Drowning by Giselle Leeb – This is a very eerie uncomfortable tale of a man in South Africa who has lived all his life in the unforgiving desert shrubland eking out a living to survive.  He fell in love with a woman from Durban who loves the wildness but perhaps wants to balance the two worlds while he sees only one way to live.  A really quiet dark tale where what is not said gives the reader a sense of something very bad about to happen and no real explanation for anything.

Hardrada by Ashley Stokes – This takes us to the summer of 2018 when the heatwave started to reveal long ago signs of town and settlements lost to history. But for a small-town gangster/pub owner named George Nunes a reckoning with a figure from his past is about to be settled.  Stokes have very lyrical turn of phrase and certain terms and phrases are used effectively again and again so that this feels like some form of mythic legend and not just small-town rivalries.  A brilliant sense of build-up and that growing feeling that some truths something about to uncovered at last.

Defensive Wounds by James Everington – this story is weird, nasty and full of the unexpected.  Teenage girls supporting a friend with cancer turns into a much darker chain of events that will haunt the teens for years afterwards.  It feels like a descent into madness and it’s rather brilliantly done because it never goes for the easy shot

The Verandah by Jay Caselberg  - Old Ma Hitchins likes to watch people wander past her house and tries to remember her past. In some ways this tale goes for the obvious but then past that reveal we get a much more unusual take of how the past can haunt people.  Again, a story I liked for never being too explicit to explain what is going on and all the better for it.

The Box of Knowledge by Tim Cooke – some local teens discover a secret hideaway where they can drink; smoke and take drugs. On one hand a tale of kids who feel they have nothing to really aim for in life but also the sense that something is using them and pulling them into a spiral of self-indulgence and releasing their darker sides.  It doesn’t go where I expected, and it felt like a momentary slip across to a much darker place you really wouldn’t want to return to.

Collector of Games by Gary Budden - This story does something with more recent urban myths.  Our narrator is a man that likes to look for the modern mysteries of video games that only a few copies were ever sought and urban legends of dark tales that you only find in the most secret parts of the web.  I was really impressed this makes a mythos and legend out of all those half-truth stories we hear, and we sense something at the heart of it all.  Probably my favourite in the collection.