Josh Malerman is one of those.
This is a difficult to get hold of at a reasonable price little volume. Limited to 500 copies from Borderlands Press last year sometime. This is copy number 265, tracked down on Ebay with a buy it now price that wasn't as frightening as it could be.
With me being the completist that I am, I had to buy it.
It contains a novella and two short stories.
Fafa Dillinger's Box
Dead Witch's Hair
Breadcrumbs
The novella - Fafa Dillinger's Box is an odd beast. It never quite moves in the direction you'd immediately expect. Malerman creates weird little worlds for himself in his books. Worlds where normal rules don't quite apply. In this story, every person has a box buried somewhere in the world that contains their capacity for evil. Our central character becomes obsessed with these boxes after a stranger, the eponymous Mr Dillinger, gives him his (Dillinger's) own box and is ordered to hide it.
The style of writing here is more akin to Malerman's Unbury Carol than Birdbox or Inspection. and that's a very good thing indeed. This is supremely atmospheric and completely unpredictable.
Dead Witch's Hair - is a very creepy short story about a boy who requests his mother leave the light on at night. It's difficult to say much more about it without leaving spoilers. Suffice to say it gave me a solid dose of the creeps.
Breadcrumbs - This could arguably be said to be quite a cliched trope in fiction, lost hiker, cabin in the woods etc, but the way Malerman writes it ensures that the tension is cranked up to 12 let alone 11. This is probably the scariest of the three stories despite the familiar premise.
Well worth the money I paid for it. I hope these stories find a home with a less limited readership. They deserve to be known far and wide.
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