 As you might expect from the title, Face the Music by Mark Towse delivers 23 short stories involving consequences in one way or another. Whether they deserve those consequences or not is where most of the interest comes from, as you're guided through character-driven stories of vengeful lunatics, spurned lovers or other, more unusual threats. Most of the offerings involve everyday situations, with characters who just want to go about their lives. Unluckily for them, fate has various paranormal or macabre plans in store. Quite a few of these plans involve hauntings which can be malicious, cautionary or sometimes tragic. There are also a couple of run-ins with deadly plant life, Satanic gatherings, flocks of bird people and more besides. Not every story has a paranormal edge to it, with tales of troubled minds working their way alongside the ghostly doings. Nobody here has an easy time of it, even the innocents. In a way that's god, because if this was all bad guys being shown the error of their ways, I would have lost interest. Seeing bad things happen to good people lends some stories a tragic, chilling atmosphere, especially when they involve circumstances beyond the character's control. Some are more straightforward morality plays, with people who are too greedy, too curious or too rotten to live being tracked down by various sinister forces. Most of the time this ends in blood, or the suggestion of blood to come, and it's those stories, teetering precariously on the verge of revealing someone's fate, that cut me the deepest. I also got a bit of the Wile E Coyote effect – maybe it's just me, and forgive the tangent, but I used to hate that bloody roadrunner, rubbing the coyote's face in it when his Acme contraptions blew up. Poor bugger was only trying to get a bite to eat. In this book you get characters who, in the same way as old Wile E, aren't necessarily deserving of damnation or mutilation - but they get it anyway. That leads to some wince-inducing moments as well as some troubling finales, with some characters tricked into their fates, while others are in the classic wrong place/wrong time trap. One story in particular had me waving my hands at the page, as if I could somehow waft the character out of th3eir predicament, in the same way 7-year old me used to wish that coyote back onto the cliff.  Not that I was rooting for the bad guy all the time. There are some real shitheels here, only they're not always cast that way from the beginning. Towse does a nice job of peeling back the layers, often introducing people before they start realising what's happening to them along with the reader. Nothing's ever straightforward enough that I could guess what's coming, though this drip-feed method is used a lot, and by the second half I wasn't feeling as edgy as I was at the start, where most the stories felt much punchier. I started expecting those reveals (a.k.a. the Shyamalan effect), and when the stories started bulking up around the midway point, I found myself waiting for the ah-ha! moment more than anything. One other thing which took the punch out of the proceedings was the large number of first person stories. The first third is heavily weighted towards that style, and while the eventual move into 3rd person narratives provides a nice change of pace, it did make the overall experience feel a bit samey, meaning that you'll probably get more out of this reading a few pieces at a time instead of half the book at once like I did. There's also the occasional slip between English and American language, which took me out of a few stories which seemed to have a more British or Australian setting. Minor quibbles aside, this is a solid collection of creepy tales that I could definitely face reading again.   the heart and soul of horror reviewsComments are closed.
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