Matthew Brockmeyer is a new writer for me. To be honest I'd never heard of him before I saw this cover pop up on a mutual friend's facebook feed a few weeks ago. I love that picture, although I'm not sure how Maurice Sendak would feel about it.
This is a collection of twenty short stories. They cover themes from lycanthropy and other assorted shapehifting, demonic possession, all too human psycopathy, lots of drug use, some Chthulu based insanity and a few gruesome accidental deaths.
The stories on the whole are well written. Some are distinctly unpredictable, leading this reader down one path and cleverly wrongfooting me in the closing pages. Others are slightly more predictable. Unfortunately there were one or two near the end of the book that I thought slipped into cliche - not bad stories, but missing the originality evident elsewhere in the book.
My undoubted favourite in the book is Have a Heart. This was a real gut punch of a story. It's also the one of the few stories without a villain. All the unpleasantness in this one (and it is truly unpleasant - in a good horror story way) is down to carelessness and bad luck on the part of the characters.
Carried statues is another one with no villain. A piece of flash fiction about a genuine medical condition (I googled it afterwards to find out). In slightly under two pages it manages to raise full sympathy for the central character and send a small shiver down the spine.
The opening story, Mine, is the one pictured on the front cover. Poor Maurice Sendak would be spinning in his grave at this one. A deeply sinister take on a child letting his inner wild thing run free.
Joyride seems to be a typical ghost story to begin with, leading the reader down a well worn path, but ducks into the metafictional undergrowth at the end, and leaves the reader with a sour taste in the mouth. This was another real standout story in the collection.
The title story is a graphically told depiction of a destructive relationship. The subtitle of this one is "A Ghost Story" and the narrator is haunted by many things including his addiction, and his memories of the perfect relationship. This is as downbeat as the title suggests. Not that downbeat is a bad thing.
In fact none of these stories have a particularly happy ending - but in short horror it is difficult to leave things all shiny and good at the end and still scare/disturb the reader for the rest of the tale.
I really enjoyed 18 out of the 20 stories in this book.
Two of them didn't quite work for me. One didn't seem to be a horror story until the last sentence. Up until then it was a fairly (actually very) good picture of a disintegrating relationship. The sudden shift in the last paragraph just left me with a feeling of "is that it?". After the good work that had gone on earlier in the story, it was frustrating.
The other miss for me is set in 1860 and written in the form of a journal kept by the narrator. Faux olde english writing is very difficult to pull off well. Matthew's writing style is good, but felt too modern in this story to be entirely convincing. This was also a fairly predictable story which didn't help.
Other than those two stories though, I found this to be a very strong collection by an exciting new talent in the field. When he's good, he's very good indeed. Some of these stories are startlingly original. Some are deeply disturbing. Even the two that missed the mark for me were very readable.
Honourable mentions to A Dirty Winter Moon, The Long List, Reckoning the Corn, Mall Santa and The Gym Teacher. I would love to write comments on all of them, but I have a day job and my bed awaits.
Overall, 7.5/10.
This book will soon be available from Black Thunder Press although I can't find their website through google, I assume they sell though Amazon.
For more info on Matthew Brockmeyer, check his website.
http://www.matthewbrockmeyer.com/
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