BOOK REVIEW : 100 Word Horrors: An Anthology of Horror Drabbles

by JOE X YOUNG 

​100 WORD HORRORS FROM KJK PUBLISHING. WRITTEN BY A CAST OF DOZENS.​

 
I opened the book with no expectations, I’ve read very few ‘drabbles’ but what I read were fine. There were many names I recognised on the TOC, yet started as anyone should, at the beginning. A mixture of stories flooded at me, some calm, some comical and others aggressive in their horror yet I continued reading, steadily picking my way through the short stories at such a rate I began to wonder if I had somehow been hypnotised. They gripped me, held fast, destroying my time as I consumed each and every delicate little morsel, leaving me hungry for more.
 
What I have written above is exactly 100 words, the same length as each of the stories in this collection. Prior to reading it I had perhaps read a dozen or so drabbles over the years and I’m aware that a vast amount of people love to do them. I didn’t really go in for the whole flash fiction scene, even though very good friends of mine were into it. I think I missed out.

I’d always been massively concerned with novels, writing ones which I then burned and/or reading masses of them for the sheer joy of it, sometimes a short story or collection would turn up by one of my favourite authors so I would give it a shot. Some stories being better than others but still entertaining, and in recent years I have enjoyed and occasionally endured short form fiction as a result of online requests in groups and of course through my association with The Ginger Nuts of Horror. I could appreciate the short form for what it is, which to me has more in common with song writing than with novels, this is because a novel as 80,000+ words to play with, and can spread out as a very involved story. A song on the other hand often has to convey a story of emotional depth in just a few minutes; there are thousands of songs which do just that.

The 100 Word Horrors book has brought together what I would consider to be a vast amount of stories, at a quick count I made it 110, from a variety of established and up-and-coming authors with the likes of Lisa Morton, Mark Cassell, Richard Chizmar, Pippa Bailey, David Owain Hughes, Michael Bray, Amy Cross, Becky Narron, Chris Kelso, Chad Lutzke and Christina Bergling to name but a few.
Each of the stories is of course bite sized, and yet I was constantly surprised by what each author had managed to do with the hundred words. With so many stories in the book and so many different authors one can expect a degree of overlap with similar themes, yet there is surprisingly little of that here and their dedication to craft has created a wealth of small but perfectly formed chillers. To me this book has many functions, it is a light read and as such could easily be the sort of thing you can get into on a tea break or the bus to work, but if you’re like me your drink will go cold or you will miss your stop and continue reading until the final tale is over. It is also a very useful guide to what is happening in contemporary horror as it is quite clear that there are many significant talents at work here with a wealth of different voices and there are several whom I’ve never read who have now enticed me to seek out more of their work.

I’m not going to single out any specific stories, as there are none which I would consider bad or confusing, they are all straightforward great little horrors, all of which are worthy of consideration. The beauty of such brevity is also that if you don’t like the story it has only been a hundred words, so you haven’t wasted hours on it. If Kevin J Kennedy decides to create another anthology such as this one then I’ll certainly look forward to reading it.

Before I go, I must give a special mention about the cover as it is one of the most inspired works of art I’ve seen on a book cover since I don’t know when. Made to look like an old gaming cassette case it has a ‘Rampage’ theme, with a King Kong like gorilla, A Werewolf and A Giant Lizard smashing burning buildings with destruction in their wake and Apache gunships et cetera firing on them. It’s all rather dramatic and I believe parallels the scale of the contents. Whether you want something to while away the afternoon, or to dip into when you have 10 minutes, this is the ideal book.

FLESH AND BLOOD: THE HAMMER HERITAGE OF HORROR