It's a hell of a start to the year for horror/horror-adjacent stuff. There are a few too many misses in here for a 5, but there are some real nightmares to be found. Black Bark and A Seaside Town feel like classics in the making. ( )

What I like about Evenson's stories are his commingling of cinematic sensibilities with the moodiness of weird fiction. The awareness being displayed here, with most stories being a twist on the familiar horror tale is delightful. They're all written in a way that only Evenson could've written and the callbacks to the stories within the collection and also from his other collections made me giddy. ( )

Solid collection of strange stories, mostly of the quiet but unsettling kind. Ambiguity abounds. There were a couple stories that I didn't get at all, but overall I really enjoyed it. ( )

What I like about Evenson's stories are his commingling of cinematic sensibilities with the moodiness of weird fiction. The awareness being displayed here, with most stories being a twist on the familiar horror tale is delightful. They're all written in a way that only Evenson could've written and the callbacks to the stories within the collection and also from his other collections made me giddy. ( )

3.5 stars, rounded up (generously) to 4 stars

I always think I'm going to like Brian Evenson's short stories more than I actually do. As an author, Evenson ought to be one of my favorites: winner of the ALA Best Horror Novel and International Horror Guild awards, finalist for the Edgar and Shirley Jackson awards. It may be significant that all of these honors derived from his novels The Open Curtain and Last Days, as I tended to prefer the longer stories in this collection. In fact, my top five included the two longest stories: "The Dust," a classic science fiction tale, at 33 pages and "Click," the 21 pages of which could have made a terrific Twilight Zone episode.

Rounding out my top five were "The Punish," about revenge; "A Collapse of Horses," in which the reader is trapped inside a collapsing mind; and "Bearheart™," which would fit quite nicely on the creepy toy shelf with Stephen King's "The Monkey." Other influences include Franz Kafka, who could easily have been the author of "A Report." What made this collection only somewhat-better-than-average for me was the same thing that bothered Goodreads reviewer Figgy, whose words I have taken the liberty of borrowing: "These stories don't have a solid resolution, leaving it up to the reader to decide, but often to a point where this reader was left wondering what the point of many of them even was." Maybe this uncertainty was "the point," but I like my horror to rest on more solid ground.

This review was based on a free ARC provided by the publisher. ( )