For Tomorrow edited by Dan Coxon

I would like to thank the editor and Black Shuck Books for an advance copy of this collection in exchange for affair and honest review

Publisher – Black Shuck Books

Published – Out Now

Price – £13.99 paperback

Wellbrook High is the school that needs no introduction. After the infamous events of 1993, it has become synonymous with unexpected – and unexplained – tragedy.

While what happened thirty years ago is still being unpicked by Internet conspiracy theorists, however, the lives of the handful of survivors are a matter of public record. In this recreation of the fabled Yearbook of ’93, some of the best emerging writers of horror and strange fiction revisit the years that followed the tragedy, and the lives of those who walked away on that fateful day.

Some might say they were the lucky ones. The reality is not so clear.

“We all live in the shadow of Wellbrook High – it’s been called the tragedy that defined a generation… That’s why this book feels so important, and so long overdue – as we go back to Wellbrook, and pay witness to those who had the courage and the strength and, yes, the simple luck to pull through. A timely work, and an urgent one.”
—Robert Shearman

Stories always have a defined ending. The final scene where we leave people and move on to the next tempting read. But the events of the speculative genres tend to be unusual so what happens next? Do you try to forget about it; are you changed or are you going to be more prone to something else. In Dan Coxon’s excellent horror linked anthology For Tomorrow we have an assembly of excellent horror and weird fiction tales imagining how one bizarre supernatural event in the 1990s changes various character’s lives forever.

In 1992 Wellbrook High in the UK had a disastrous Event that left many dead and many more scarred physically and mentally for the rest of their lives. As teenagers turned into adults, we find that a vast number continued to have weird experiences perhaps in some way related to the past. This is a fascinating collection with an intriguing spin on the ideas of found footage and cursed object but in this case it’s the character who is cursed and here are their unknown later stories. These relatively young people are through very little fault of their own now marked in some way. This was the type of collection where I thought I’ll just try one and then found a few hours later I’d devoured it in one sitting!

We start with ‘Carrion’ by Lucie McKnight Hardy. A tale that slowly builds up in tension but also our understanding of the characters we are to meet. A friend is visiting her old schoolfriend – both of whom have been marked by Wellbrook. Hardy explores friendship from painful but familiar teenage rebellion to still having someone in adulthood who knows you better than most people. Here though the scars of the school have left their marks on both our narrator and Jackie the friend she visits. A suburban house in a nice part of town grows sinister as does a simple trip to the back garden. It feels like a tale where the two characters were always destined to find themselves in this place. Haunting.

We get a stranger and more international flavour of a tale in ‘Finger and Palm’ by Malcolm Devlin and Helen Marshall. This is more a tale rotating a cast of characters all slightly connected and all perhaps marked in ways they don’t yet understand to be drawn to one small European city for one strange day. Two former high school lovers agreed to meet here and neither seem quite aware of what else if at play. With strange imagery of cities, streets, saints and myths its more a tale of a ritual finally being played but also captures the feeling of lost love and a desire to be happy that may never be met.

In ‘Amusements’ by Verity Holloway there is an unsettling tale of a young fortune teller taking over a stand at a decaying UK seaside town. Libby does indeed appear to have some form of gift for this, but it doesn’t seem to bring wealth in her trade nor happiness in her own life as we see a very delicate but perhaps toxic relationship in its possibly final throes and then most troubling a mysterious sack hanging from a pier that appears to have something living within it. Atmospheric and troubling but without ever explaining itself too much, it’s a cunning piece of writing making us wonder what happens next.

One of my favourite stories is ‘As I Want You To Be’ by Ray Cluely. Two friends in a bar starts a tale that weaves back in time to Wellbrook just before The Event. Clueley captures painful first love in schooldays to nervous new love blossoming in a late-night encounter in a student bar and then makes us revisit what we are seeing. Our pasts can haunt us in more ways than one and even then, we may still be doomed. It also accurately captures the feel o the 1990s in all its forms even the music. Truly bittersweet horror.

That late 1990s addition to all our lives we called the internet appears in the aptly named ‘Hyperlink’ by Polis Loizou. The way many people that found it opened up the world in music, forums and possibility of friends who would never meet but also in cyberspace can be stranger encounters using a sense of loneliness to call people to it. We focus on Josh a loner who finds its hard to switch away and a fantastic new artist who speaks directly to him more than all the random encounters and dates that his other online adventures have provided. Its captures the feel of obsession and that scary feeling that not all online are who they are alleged to be.

There feels room for dark comedy in ‘The Crumbling Edifice’ by Ashley Stokes as we meet a demon hunter and driving instructor but this story is one of the darkest in the collection. It uses the idea of those who claim they’ve done horrific deals thanks to demonic pacts and imagines what if these could be real. Neither answer will make you feel better about the world and for those of us who were isolated geeks back in the 1990s this may bring some uncomfortable moments of similarity that slightly make us worry could we ever do this. Stokes takes us on a history tour of one particular online myth and those who believe they encountered it and then in a great spooky urban location we have to decide what will happen next. A great story!

The isolation of adulthood is explored in ‘Habitual’ by Daniel carpenter a very impressive and unsettling tale. Our narrator after Wellbrook falls into alcoholism and just about living day to day and then gets an offer to mind a luxury office block. Things are of course too good to be true, but this tale feels like a sinister trap that offers someone what they always craved but then seeks to offer their destruction too. I really like how this story plays with the feeling as you grow older that you can be a lot more alone even when living in huge cities.

Another favourite tale is Shadowing by Penny Jones. Emily has gone back to the family home and has reluctantly agreed to go for a new job as a carer. Jones plunges Emily into the life of a carer from hospital elderly clients to a harsh world of timesheets and ever-changing instructions. What impressed me here is how Jones weaves through asides and a few explanations the wider part of Emily’s life and we get through those clues to full in what has happened and where she comes from. The more we know the more we fear for Emily and then the final scenes brings her past straight to her face and we fear exactly how she will react and Emily does what we hope she is not. Brilliant psychological horror and that none of this is necessarily supernatural makes it possibly even more horrific.

I really enjoyed the tables being turned in CC Adam’s ‘As If Your Mouth Were Shown Shut’. Our confident smart main character feels a date is about to not show up; but he gets to luxuriate in the city he now calls home and loves and then explore the people around him. Here a confident smart character though meets his match when his date appears. It’s a story where the unsettling question is has his Wellbrook experience made him prone to other kinds of monsters and it’s a tale of finding out that you’re in the web and the owner of it is coming ever closer. The ratcheting up of fear is delivered very well and the reader gets to decide if a close call or simply the appetiser to worse events has only just taken begun.

We get a unique but impressive modern folk horror tale in ‘Shadow Burdens’ by Charlotte Bond. Here is how our narrator lived after Wellbrook with the skill to see what haunts a person and the intriguing skills to remove it. This feels almost too optimistic for the collection and indeed Bond has a brilliant idea on how such a power can also cause havoc. The reader is then placed in the uncomfortable position of asking if they approve or not. No easy answers are allowed and that means this tale feels by the end rather troubling indeed!

Trying to escape the past traumas of your life allows for the horrible situation Phil Sloman sets up in ‘Trial’. Desperate to be clear of the nightmares in his life our narrator takes a new drug. We get to see the pain that has brought hi to this point, the result of the new drugs and a worrying fear about what is now out there. Bleak, speedy, nasty, and very effectively delivered!

Finally, in ‘Comments On This Video Have been Disabled’ by James Everington which manages in written form to deliver a powerfully creepy found footage nightmare. An acclaimed youtuber who visits haunted locations has created one last video that is very different to all his other tales. One that has some parallels to Wellbrook but altogether different. The raw footage Everington describes with added mild notes as to what we see and how this varies from the norm for this vlogger build up a sense of someone who has finally re-found their nightmare and now can’t get out of it. The fear of what we can’t quite see or hear gets more and more palpable and we feel we are watching someone fall out of the world. Its soberingly frightening and works very well to cap the collection.

For Tomorrow I think is one of the creepiest collections I’ve read managing to offer varied and powerful stories and yet at no time is it ever clear what did happen in 1993 at Wellbrook which makes it even by the end more ominous and sinister. I do wonder if we could find more lost pupils from that school in the future, but this is a standout modern horror collection well worth tracking down! Strongly recommended!