NIGEL PARKIN
If you’re a regular visitor to this site you might think you need no introduction to The Sinister Horror Company, whose logo features prominently on our home page and who are arguably the most exciting thing to happen to independent horror publishing in the UK in the last five years. You might therefore be in danger of overlooking the little Pocket Guide the company have just released to give a flavour of their writers’ work. Perhaps you have already read some of these authors’ novels or dipped into the three volumes of The Black Room Manuscripts, the marvellous short story anthologies published for various charities. You will at the very least be aware of this site’s own Kit Power and Kayleigh Marie Edwards. You might therefore think you’ve passed the stage of introductions. You’re already familiar, already friends, already fully involved…
If that’s the case then let me urge you to think again and to take a look at this terrific tiny package. What company co-founder, author and editor Justin Park has put together here is not a mere gathering of ‘taster’ extracts but an original, enormously impressive and indeed inspiring collection of self-contained micro-fictions. They are fantastic vignettes, all packing considerable punches, and they stand apart from everything else the company have offered so far not just as a distinct and irresistible offering but as fresh evidence of the power and potential of horror flash fiction. Horror is the natural home for the short sharp shock as we have seen in the specialist work of Michael A Arnzen and in the brilliantly witty brevity of one of my personal heroes, the great Jeff Strand. If you’ve never come across ‘Really, Really Ferocious’, the first piece in his essential collection, Gleefully Macabre Tales, you have missed a treat. Go find it now – you’ll thank me! There is indeed a genuine ferocity about this new pocket guide. A ferocity of intellect, of ambition, of talent and of vision. These are stories that tear into you, even the ones aiming for sinister suggestion rather than explicit description, expressed as they all are with a keen elegance that cuts like a knife. You can of course dip in and out and shuffle these pieces in any way your mood takes you but that would be to miss the cleverness of the editing. They are very carefully sequenced for maximum impact. We begin with Adam Millard’s Snow, a tribute to the creeping dread and black-haired female wraiths of J-horror. This is a very short piece but perfectly and even poetically paced, painting a vivid picture with a very distinct, black and white palette. It’s all about the anticipation of approaching terror and is as such the best possible place to start. With the second piece, Jonathan Butcher’s Special Delivery, we begin to see that ideas, themes or images will bleed from one story into the next. As with ‘Snow’ here we have a family about to encounter a hideous horror. In this case the impact is much more explosively colourful! Butcher brings full-on, outlandish gore and a wicked twist to the party…which will come as no surprise to anyone who has successfully stomached The Chocolateman! Benedict J. Jones’ Pick-Up also offers a twist and links to Butcher’s piece in its presentation of a certain kind of surprise appearance. To say any more would be to give too much away! Suffice it to say Jones grips you with the question of whether or not you’re going to see a particularly unpleasant, predatory man on the look-out for a one night stand get his come-uppance. Jones times his effects brilliantly and captures the voice of this bastard with grim accuracy. Ideas of revelation and realization and the theme of the beast within continue in Lydian Faust’s Wishbone. Here we are back to a family scene, only this time the members of the family themselves are a source of distinct unease. They are ‘entertaining’ their daughter’s new boyfriend, whose vegetarian upbringing is being challenged by their insistence that he pulls on a goose bone and makes a wish. Appropriately enough for a story written by a Faust(!) this ultimately presents the idea of a hellish pact and the triumph of the devil within. If Faust ends with a kind of damnation, Daniel Marc Chant picks up that strand with the opening line of his wonderfully Lovecraftian The Nameless Thing – ‘And so, at last, I have come to the end of the world, or at least that part of it known to Man.’ We’re at the mountains of madness here, a ‘world of ice, darkness and certain death’ in which our narrator, the last survivor of a group who invoked a demon, considers the fates of his fellows and his own imminent doom. Friends of The Sinister Horror Company will be aware that Chant, the other co-founder, knows his horror heritage and here he has great fun with classic Chthulu-esque tropes. Stuart Park’s The Benefits of Family is another very short piece with a killer twist. This little gem takes its place in a fine British tradition of morbid dark comedy, the tradition that gave us such masterworks as Kind Hearts and Coronets. Here the humour is of a blackness every bit as alluring and elegant as the outfit of the striking and mysterious mourner spotted by the narrator at a family funeral. Rich Hawkins’ The Hungry Gods is possibly the most ambitious piece, attempting in just over five pages to present a disturbing dystopia where looming Lovecraftian gods are powerfully representative of real forces of persecution, ’cleansing’ and terror. Hawkins achieves a remarkable feat here, combining the close-up tragedies of desperate individuals with a picture of a devastated society and a greater sense of something unknowable and unnameable. Tracy Fahey’s piece is the second in the collection to make use of the marvellously pulpy term, ‘Thing’, in this case The Thing Upstairs. I am always excited by the ways in which writers and filmmakers play with this word – on the one hand so deceptive in its apparently childish simplicity, on the other so magnificently suggestive of indescribable terror that even the most sophisticated language turns to it in instinctive, shuddering desperation. Fahey’s short masterpiece is a beautiful example of this duality – eloquently expressing what is essentially the most fundamental childhood fear of what might lurk in our bedroom once the light is switched off in such a way that, like the central word itself, it becomes expressive of any very real adult anxiety. Once again we are perhaps dealing with the terror within…only this time the most powerful and frightening of all – the subconscious, the debilitating, overwhelming imagination of the self. There’s a neat bit of interpretation at work on the editor’s part in the placing of the next piece, Vincent Hunt’s Bungee. Here the understandable feelings of total disorientation and fear brought on by the title activity are externalised as…well, you must see for yourself! But is it real or a trick of the mind? If we are reading in sequence, still in thrall to Fahey’s piece, we may see even more in the waters beneath our hapless hero. As with so many of the pieces in this collection one is struck by the expert balance of description and suggestion, the explicit and the vague – a mark of the very best evocations of terror. Andrew Freudenberg’s Rachel and the Good Times goes for a very different vibe. This turns the gore and the gross-out up to eleven, aiming to have us gagging by the end of the first paragraph and then cheering a virtuoso display of splatterpunk brutality and energy. Never has the line, ‘Now, I am starving’ come with a more gleefully nasty edge. As the title character slakes her horrific appetite Freudenberg gives us such a rich, tasty junk-food rush of ultraviolence that we are left hungry for more. Danny King’s The Stranger has the feel of a classic folk tale, as our narrator describes an encounter with a strange, haunted figure at a bar who has passed on a curse. King exerts a masterful grip, drawing us into a doomed sense of intimacy with the narrator. Kit Power’s Swimming is not just the bleakest piece in this collection, it may very well be the bleakest thing you have ever read. The world has been flooded, leaving one little girl to swim through nights and days of tantalising visions and appalling, harrowing memories, in a desperate attempt to reach land. In just two pages Power manages to give this extraordinary piece the feel of a Biblical myth while also breaking our hearts with its human dimension, the aching echoes of everything that is most beautiful and precious lost to the cries of the circling gulls and the sound of the lapping water…the water… Paul Kane’s Mind the Gap explores the same territory as Fahey’s piece. Here again we have an adult still in the grip of childhood fears of what might lurk behind doors at bedtime. Kane gives even more weight to the struggle between the rational and the deliriously paranoid mind. The symbolism of doors either as gateways to other dimensions or openings into the darkest corners of the mind is well utilised. If Danny King’s piece was like a modern take on an old folk tale, Kayleigh Marie Edwards’ Dinner Time is like a gruesome urban legend, the kind collected by Jan Harold Brunvand from oral sources. You can imagine the pleasant shivers passing round a college dorm or a camp fire as a gleeful storyteller recounts the tale of the unfortunate Stacey, her husband Lee, a horrifying text message…and a particularly shocking dinner time surprise. The penultimate tale is editor Justin Park’s own offering, Guard Against Demons, and it neatly reflects on several of the themes we have already encountered. Here again there is a desperate attempt to evade the terrors perceived by a childish mind, only this time the desperation is even more immediate because the narrator still is a child. There are shades of the influence of Guillermo Del Toro and Juan Antonio Bayona in the orphanage setting but the character voice and emotional weight are entirely Park’s own. If Power gave us a child literally at sea Park gives us the metaphorical equivalent, a little boy adrift in a world of cruel children and uncaring adults, trying to salvage the one object that holds the precious memories of a mother’s love and protects him from the demons… The final story is very deliberately placed. Simply called Death it is the shortest piece in the book and works as a coda. When I tell you that it is written by the frankly terrifying Mr Matt Shaw you will know that this is a piece which will delight in confounding your expectations. The man who has written many many more words than all the other authors in this collection put together gives us a mere two paragraphs. He presents Death as a character, standing alone and regarding the vast spread of humanity, much as this story stands alone looking back over the spread of haunted souls we have just encountered. Surely we are about to get the ultimate full stop, the definitive depiction of the deepest darkness as the sickest mind in contemporary horror shows us our end. Well, there’s a sublime surprise in store. Ultimately Shaw’s piece links Death with the girl in the sea and the little boy in the orphanage and speaks for the whole collection by making us appreciate that the most profound horror has to have heart. So there you have it. An essential collection. Many of these pieces will, I am sure, have a life beyond this little book. Get it. Cherish it. It is not just a guide, it’s a mission statement, a wonderful creative cry of affirmation and possibility. This is no mere appendix to the work of The Sinister Horror Company, it is a part of its beating heart. Get involved. Open the door. But mind the gap… 
GENRE LEGEND BRAIN KEENE NEEDS OUR HELP!
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