“A school camping trip takes a terrifying turn for the worst”

Set in the southern moorlands of the Devonshire area of England, “The Moor” opens with a 1951 newspaper clipping recounting the mysterious disappearance of two children from Rutmoor. Throughout the novel further clippings are interspersed between chapters which flip between 2015 and 2002 where the majority of the action is set. The clippings give shrouded clues of the direction in which the story heads, also reporting the unprovoked killings of pets and small animals which have been ritualistically mutilated.  Initially, all this chopping and changing in the story is a tad distracting, however, once you get the hang of the style and multiple points of view over the two time periods, the novel gets easier to follow. The larger sections are set in 2002 when the friends are young teenagers, with the 2015 part picking up the same characters thirteen years later. If you do struggle with the opening, make sure you stick with it, as it is well worth it. 
 
In the summer of 2002, a group of 13-year-old boys go on a camping trip in Rutmoor National Park, accompanied by the newest member of their friendship group, Tim, and his dad who is a skilled hill walker. They set out to navigate their way across the park, taking in all the different peaks which is a popular local outdoor activity. However, Rutmoor has a reputation for both unpredictable weather and strange disappearances, which Mr Stevens reveals during campfire stories during their first night in the wild, scaring the boys. Local folklore stories are aplenty, all claiming these vanishings are caused by the ghost of a beautiful red-haired witch found hanged nearby in the early 19th century, murdered by suspicious locals. The following morning, Gary, the joker of the group is missing from his tent, along with all his belongings. There is no mobile phone service, they are miles away from help, the group begin to argue, and their problems are just beginning. But for the reader the fun is just beginning.
 
Does everyone survive? The author keeps this cleverly shrouded and the reader guessing as the plot in the main 2002 storyline unfolds and quickly picks up pace, culminating with a dramatic conclusion thirteen years later which ties both strands together.  Haysom builds tension with lots of nice touches, such as a severed rabbit foot outside one of the tents. Is this someone playing a prank or has one of the group got ulterior motives? You’re never quite sure, but as the rain begins to lash down, every broken tree looks threatening to the frightened boys. An animal skull is much more terrifying as the author nods towards “The Blair Witch Project” and other familiar horror landmarks.
 
The multiple points of view between Gary, James, Tom, Matt, and Tim works particularly well and the boys are convincing and likable characters, with their banter natural and entertaining. Ranging from the clown Gary, who always takes the joke too far, or the sporty and confident Tom, to the overweight James. Tim is the socially awkward and introverted new member of the friendship group, who has issues that are revealed as the book develops.
 
Sam Haysom does a fine job of making the most of a terrific natural setting and in many ways Rutmoor National Park is the star of the book. It’s incredibly well drawn, and through the eyes of these teenagers you’ll feel the rain, mist and wind whistling through their tents with them. Welcome to England everyone! The initial nods to the 19th century witch were a little too obvious and I was delighted to see the author take the story in a different direction. Also, because it was set in 2002, mobile phones had not yet become advanced enough to play a significant part of the story which I really liked. 
 
“The Moor” will undoubtedly remind you of lots of other novels and films, but it has enough going for it to stand nicely on its two feet and it was an impressive debut novel and a fine read.
 
Tony Jones
 

Alan Baxter’s latest release “Manifest Recall” is the literary equivalent of a vicious kick in the nether regions, or if you hail from my Scottish homeland the famous ‘Glaswegian kiss’. Thankfully it’s a relatively short read, and the punches wing in thick and fast, so you should hopefully escape with a few superficial cuts and bruises. But afterwards, whilst your better half gently tends to your aches and pains, you’ll be wishing you could go a few more rounds with damaged enforcer Eli Carver.
 
First up, if you’ve looking for a book which is deep, meaningful, thoughtful with characters who throw smoky stares at each other over a nice glass of red wine then look elsewhere, you’ve got the wrong book. “Manifest Recall” has more in common with a brutal barfight with a sledgehammer than anything else and wears its violent heart bleeding on its sleeve. To quote another reviewer who nails it on the head: “bad people doing bad things to other bad people”. Don’t expect pillow fighting. There are no good guys. Not even our man Eli.
 
In the style of the great film “Memento” we are introduced to Eli Carver in the middle of a major personality crisis. Having had some sort of unspecified breakdown, his memory is fractured, but soon he recalls killing a man when he was 28 years old. But was that murder yesterday or ten years ago? Moving on, the assassinations past and present begin to pile up.  Eli’s memory returns sporadically, an important device used to spill key elements of the backstory, and he also has blackouts which can last for hours or longer. Whilst he is in one of these trances he is even more dangerous than usual and that’s saying something.
 
The novella opens with Eli in a beat-up of car with an attractive young woman whom he doesn’t recognise, but who most certainly knows him. Her reaction is a combination of fear, familiarity and severely pissed off. As his memory returns he remembers the woman as the step-daughter of his gangster boss Vernon Sykes, a young woman he has known since she was a child. So, what’s she doing with him? I’m not going to go into any further with plot spoilers but be prepared for an unrelenting, brutal, and vicious assault which by the time you get to the final pages has a huge body count. Something about the ruthless efficiency of the killing machine Eli reminded me of the Keanu Reeves character “John Wick”.
 
“Manifest Recall” isn’t strictly a horror novel, but as layers of ugly truth are peeled back and dark secrets are revealed, there is a lot of horror on offer and the scene in which we discover the reason for Eli’s meltdown is totally uncompromising. It’s also powerfully written and will knock the stuffing out of the most hardened horror freak. The story does have some supernatural overtones with Eli seeing, and having imaginary conversations with some of his own victims, all of which want him dead. Through very fast paced storytelling, and a masterful economy of words, Baxter balances Eli’s own guilt with his need for revenge in a high quality and very readable thriller which you’ll whizz through in no time. 
 
Will Eli Carver return for a second outing? I hope so… “Manifest Recall” has a very cool and satisfying ending but there is definite scope for this very likeable bad boy to bounce back and cause more mayhem. If you enjoy unrelenting, almost comic book action, with an atmospheric urban setting this novella is a top quality read.
 
Tony Jones

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…

‘Aneeda’ is the online alias for Anita who makes a living as a camgirl, spending her time in various state of undress in front of a camera chatting with punters and doing sleazy stuff for her audience. Her goal, to entice them into paying for private shows or buy her expensive stuff from her ‘wants’ list which she regularly advertises. Initially ‘Aneeda’ is successfully detached from Anita’s real life and much of this unpleasant, but very readable, novella centres upon what happens when she cannot.
 
A friendly warning, the sex stuff is explicit, voyeuristic and not for the faint-hearted or easily offended. To quickly set the tone; within a few pages she has a huge dildo up her rear, with much worse to follow. From the early stages this type of sex scene is portrayed in a bland, matter of fact manner, exploring what the young woman does on camera. But after a while dialogue such as “You wanna’ fuck my ass? You wanna’ fill my hole?” as see in the webcam chat dialogue quickly gets repetitive.
 
However, before repetition truly sets in the story moves in a much stranger direction, as Anita finds herself waking up suffering from memory loss, her body feels sore and used. Eventually a friend accuses her of going beyond cam-work and into hardcore porn as she’s certain she saw her in a dirty film Anita has no recollection of making. To say much more of the plot would give too much away, and this novella is best read without too much insight. Spoilers will ruin the freaky direction it sleazes and oozes into. I read it almost completely blind and on one level this did not prepare me for the explicit stuff, but on the other hand I was also left scratching my head as some of it was very confusing. Is Anita losing her mind? I really could not figure out what was going on. The reader might find themselves asking the same question. But there is nothing wrong with a certain level of blurriness.
 
As other reviews and blurbs say, before long we head into David Cronenberg territory, bloody body horror and the crossing of genres into science fiction. The writing is very fractured and broken, reflecting Anita’s mental and physical state where she loses touch with reality and her own consciousness. As she drifts further from reality the porn gets nastier, emptier and more explicit. Her lack of control is evident and as the novella is initially written in the first person “I” tense we have a direct look at what is inside Anita’s head and that’s a confusing place to be. Much of it makes uncomfortable reading, especially the second half when Anita is used again and again and the connection between her mind and body is completely dysfunctional, one of the recurring themes of the novella.
 
Perhaps the author was trying to make a deep statement about the evils of the porn industry, if that was the case, it is explored in the strangest of ways, and ultimately a very original, if unpleasant, manner.  Porn is portrayed, rather voyeuristically, through a woman who for long periods does not seem to inhabit her own body. There is exploitation on all sorts of levels, but it also nails on the head the blandness and repetitiveness of hardcore sex. However, it’s a pacey book to read and has as much explicit gore as it does porn, especially in the second half. In other interviews the author has mentioned horror films such as “Inseminoid”, “Forbidden World” and “The Brood” and those influences are as clear as day in this novella and are solid points of reference.
 
“All Internal” is very likely to split opinion, many will hate it, but equally so I’m sure it will pick up many fans. Saying “I enjoyed it” is not quite the correct phrase, but it was never dull in any conventional way, and I was fascinated in seeing where the author took this off-beat story. David Cronenberg is the most obvious name-check, but I also reminded of Michel Faber’s “Under the Skin” and perhaps even David Lynch. I’m sure many readers will be heading straight to the shower, to wash away the filth, after getting to the end. A tough and demanding read for those who like their fiction to have serious edge.
 
Tony Jones

With his most recent novella, Kristopher Triana offer us yet another wildly different story from his seemingly bottomless well of ideas.  The Detained is the story of a high school reunion, kind of.  It's set up reminded me of the 80's slasher film, Slaughter High, where a group of bullies are summoned to their alma mater under the pretense of a reunion but in reality it was just an way to get them in one place to be picked off.   Triana takes that sort of device but as is his way, he skews it, violently.

We have a handful of characters who endured high school together- the dope-peddling loser  and the bookish nerd girl, both of whom have redeemed themselves and become successful opposites of what was expected of them.  Also we have the snobby popular hot chick and the all-favored jock, they too finding themselves on the opposite end of their expectations in life.  With them is the retired principal, who was only a gym teacher when they attended.  Together they are trapped in a darkened gymnasium for a reason they can't quite figure out, until grisly and tragic clues start tor reveal themselves.

Triana's novella is a fast and easy read. Full of tension and relatable characters.  It's a ghost story with teeth and bruised knuckles.   The Detained is the horror movie John Hughes always wanted to make but never had the balls to.   It's honest and as open as a wound.  It's also a helluva a lot of fun.  Put on your party best and attend.
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The Detained is available from Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing