 Many thanks to Erin Sweet Al-Mahairi and Raw Dog Screaming Press for sending me this book in exchange for an honest review. I have mixed feelings about this collection. On the positive side, I found James Chambers to be an excellent writer. His characters have depth and are believable. For the most part, the stories are excellently paced for being short stories. And he writes with a pleasing narrative tone - no complaints from me about how the writing sounds in my head as I read it. Often while reading the book, I was able to take a step back and think, . I can see why he’s won awards and nominations (in fact, I just learned this collection is on the 2019 Bram Stoker Awards Preliminary Ballot). But there were just a fair amount of stories in this collection that just didn’t resonate with me at all. And to be fair, it is not a reflection of James’ writing ability - he is a talented writer. It’s just that many of them had themes or characters that I wasn’t familiar with, so it was hard for me to get into them. I’d never heard of characters like Carl Kolchak from a few movies and a TV series, or Anton Zarnak, a character created by author Lin Carter. I’m not saying that fellow readers won’t enjoy these stories if they’d never heard of these characters. I just felt like I would have enjoyed them better understanding some of the context behind the stories. Otherwise, they were just stories in which I couldn’t find a meaning.  There were a few stories that I really enjoyed. “The Driver, Under a Cheshire Moon” opens with a man in the driver’s seat of the car with a woman duct taped in the front seat, her unconscious boyfriend in the backseat, and a small baby next to him in a car seat. This story was beautifully written with perfect dialogue and an ending I could have never foreseen. Without giving too much away, it touches on a cause that means a lot to me - missing children - and so it really resonated with me. “Marco Polo” is another story that I really liked. It starts off with a group of teens exploring an abandoned, burned-out supermarket where police had uncovered an underground torture chamber. One of the kids decides to demonstrate his bravery by sneaking into the chamber and returning with an artifact. I love old or abandoned buildings and wish I could explore them all, so this story let me live vicariously through the explorer’s eyes, and it had a gory and unexpected twist. “What’s in the Bag, Dad?” was another one of my favorites. It’s a type of carnival horror set back around the time of the Great Depression. One of the main attractions in the sideshow is Luna, the wife of the show owner/manager, who stood motionless in a glass case. She had been fatally shot one night during a robbery. Her father, a magician, was somehow able to preserve her like a living doll, and the spell would be broken once they found the man who shot her. A haunting, heartbreaking tale. There were a few stories that tipped a hat to Lovecraft, so cosmic horror fans should definitely check out “A Song Left Behind in the Aztakea Hills” and “Odd Quahogs.” So while the collection is not among my favorite short story anthologies, I feel like James’ talented writing and wide array of themes in this collection will appeal to many types of readers.   Comments are closed.
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