Took me a while to get through this anthology of horror stories. Found a lot of the tales rather pedestrian e.g. Paymon’s Trio by Collette de Curzon covers similar ground to Lovecraft’s The Music of Erich Zann but fizzles out in an anti-climactic damp squib of ending. Others come across as ill advised stylistic experiments: Fragments of a Broken Doll by Cate Gardner and The Book of Dreems (sic) seem to be trying for some kind of dreamlike atmospheric, hallucinatory atmosphere but come across as pretentious and largely incomprehensible.

Things do pick up in the latter half of the book: Paul Finch’s Tools of the Trade could be yet another hackneyed Jack the Ripper Tale but impresses with its realistically wrought post-industrial north of England setting. Laura Mauro offers an intriguingly different spin on the werewolf myth in Sun Dogs whose survivalist sub-text perhaps has additional resonance during the current Covi19 crisis. Mark Morris, whose novels I have to admit I’ve never much liked, provides an effective tale of rustic cosmic horror in We Sing Beneath the Ground, possibly inspired by the old monster movie classic “Gorgo”. Best story of the bunch is Shell Baby by HV Leslie – a disturbing account of unconventional motherhood in which the protagonist doesn’t so much give birth to a monster as adopt it, with dire consequences. All in all a mixed bag, but worth a look for the stronger stories on offer. ( )

This could have been titled Best British Weird Stories 2018 because the anthology has some of the flavor of those Year’s Best Weird Stories put out by Undertow Publications. Most of the stories are not horror of the visceral, gruesome, and frightening sort. They range from surrealism – mostly pointless – to well-done variations of old horror situations.

The Reggie Oliver stories did not disappoint even if one, “A Day with the Delusionists” is a satire on poets and Oxford University, wit and no horror though there is a murder. The Delusionists is an Oxford club of students, and, at one of their costume parties in 1973, an aging poet ends up dead.

The other Oliver story is decidedly something else. First appearing in a theme anthology built around Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray, “Love and Death” reverses Wilde’s premise of a portrait that absorbs the moral and physical failings of its subject. Here the circus strongman, who stands as the model for Love in the titular painting, begins to weaken. Too late, the painter realizes that, John Keats to the contrary, beauty and truth are not the same as the figure of Death changes in the painting.

Death and art beautiful and dangerous also show up in David McGachey’s “TING-A-LING-A-LING”. Here, in the middle of World War One, folklorist Dr. Lawrence is told about the Awakening Clock, an elaborate mechanism that is not only a clock – which strikes an added hour – but a clockwork animation of a village. It’s an effective tale that manages to pleasingly weld several horror motifs together. Dr. Lawrence is, evidently, a series character from McGachey, and, even before I read the author’s bio notes, the influence of M. R. James was noticeable.

While McGachey’s tale seems fresh even if it looks back to James’ work, there is a decided antique air about Colette De Curzon’s “Paynom’s Trio”. That’s not surprising. It was first written in 1949 and not published until 2018. It’s a pleasant enough story that goes through its paces to a rather slight ending. It’s yet another tale of a beautiful but dangerous work of art, here a score for piano, cello, and violin that falls out of a book the narrator impulsively buys. Naturally, being a music buff, he gets together with his friends to play it.

Besides menacing art, there’s another theme running through this anthology: alienation and social atomization whether it’s the weakening of family ties, isolation, or perversion and abandonment of the basic human impulse to reproduce. Unfortunately, that theme is not that well developed in most of the stories.

An exception is “The Affair” from James Everington, a fresh tale with unexpected turns, and one of the anthology’s highlights. A study of how our better selves, the ones others love, can erode away with time, it’s the story of Peter and Lynda, a married couple with child. One night, after being stood up by his best friend, Peter finds himself alone in a pub when a woman who looks an awful lot like Lynda, a younger Lynda, propositions him. He accepts. After all, it seems to be Lynda albeit the Lynda he once knew. It’s not really cheating. Perhaps it’s some trick of Lynda’s to rekindle their marriage. But what if it’s not his wife and what if Lynda has her own version of Peter?

There doesn’t seem to have been a lot of love or friendship in the life of Sian, the protagonist in A. K. Benedict’s post-mortem fantasy “Departures”. And now she’s dead and haunting the departures lounge in the Dublin Airport. The story is inventive in its depiction of the living and the dead, ghosts to each other, and what needs to be done to leave the airport purgatory, but the ending is muddled and muted.

The alienation is even stronger with the loner protagonist of Laura Mauro’s “Sun Dogs”. The child of Christian survivalists, Sadie has led a childhood filled with talk of the Rapture and preparing for the End Times. The parents are dead now, but she still lives in the desert and, one night, after almost hitting a man prowling around the highway with a rifle, she picks up June, a woman who might have a connection with some recent killings in the area. I found the ending morally appalling, but I suspect Mauro intended something else.

If “Sun Dogs” represents the dangers of feminine compassion and empathy, two other stories have the maternal instinct suborned or perverted.

“Shell Baby” from V. H. Leslie is another highlight of the book, and I’m not just saying that because it’s set in the Orkneys where I was a few weeks ago. Elspeth, a self-employed florist, feels life and business wearing her down so she gets a house on an isolated island. But one night, under the green glow of the Northern Lights, she impulsively bathes in the sea. The next morning she finds a strange creature on the beach. Leslie consciously reworks the Frankenstein story – after all, Frankenstein built his second monster in the Orkneys – to a horrific end. This is one of the few stories in the book which is genuinely horrifying.

Like Elspeth, the heroine of Mark Morris’ “We Who Sing Beneath the Ground” is also single and childless. This is a well-done story of the old school as teacher Stacy goes out to a Cornwall farm to see why one of her pupils hasn’t shown up for class lately. I don’t know if the bit of Cornish folklore cited is real or not.

Claire Dean’s “The Unwish” is another take on social separation and a subtle one at that. Amy, along with her domineering older sister Sara and her parents, are returning to the old family vacation cabin after 20 years. Amy is eagerly awaiting her new boyfriend showing up. But things take a peculiar turn when Amy begins to think she used to have sisters and not just a sister. And what if Aidan, the new boyfriend, really doesn’t love her. This story rewards a re-reading. Dean may not tie everything up neatly, but the loose strings of the story do not spoil it. It’s a weird story that uses ambiguity well.

I can’t say the same for Nicholas Royle’s “Dispossession” though it’s about the social isolation of a man. Our recently divorced protagonist doesn’t talk to many people apart from estate agents as a he hunts for a new apartment. We hear about his kids and washing their clothes. We never see or hear the kids. The man also spends some time voyeuristically watching the neighboring houses and apartments through binoculars. The abrupt ending is something of a letdown for a story that had promise. I think I know what Royle intended. I just don’t think he explained the why of it well.

Frittering away promise and reading like an unresolved piece of flash fiction that was way too long, Ray Cluley’s “In the Light of St. Ives” starts out well. Emily needs to go to the Welsh seaside resort to find out why her younger sister, Claire, an impulsive and artistic sort, set her rented house on fire. From her bed and under psychiatric observation, Claire tells her sister there’s some problem with the colors in the place. Cluley’s three sentence climax welshes on the promise of revealing not only cause but effect.

Two stories annoyed me with their surrealism and obscurity: Georgina Bruce’s “The Book of Dreems” and Cate Gardner’s “Fragments of a Broken Doll”. I could not be bothered to decipher what they were about assuming there was a coherent intent.

Bruce’s tale centers around a creature who may be a woman locked up in a house or she may be a robot locked up in a house. Her boyfriend appears to be some combination of inventor or service technician/stalker and maybe a would-be killer.

Gardner’s tale is about Trill, who seems to live in a house by a prison with Harry who may be a prison guard or policeman and probably isn’t related to her. An escaped convict shows up.

There’s no problem with ambiguity in two stories that, if not walking new ground, at least deport themselves respectively down old paths.
Charlotte Bond’s “The Lies We Tell” is an old style morality tale. Its thoroughly unlikeable protagonist, Cathy, is a real-estate agent, disloyal to her husband, and a selfish wife and mother. But, above all, she is an habitual liar, so you know, when she starts hearing noises whenever she utters a falsehood, a reckoning is coming.

You could, I suppose, call Mark West’s non-supernatural “The Taste of Her” a biter-bitten story. But its punishment seems way out of proportion to the crime. That crime would be adultery. Ian goes on a flight with his old friend Keith in Keith’s Cessna. And what a ride it is as Keith threatens to crash the plane into the ground if Ian doesn’t confess to sleeping with the former’s wife. And that’s just the beginning of Ian’s problems. This one also justifies inclusion in a horror anthology.

And an old stand-by of British horror shows up, Jack the Ripper, in Paul Finch’s “Tools of the Trade”. A local councilman and amateur ghosthunter approaches a local reporter with a profitable proposition: help him recover Jack the Ripper’s knives from a shut up Great Northern Hotel in a Lancashire town. The night excursion into the hotel features the literary equivalents of jump scares, and Finch drags out some common horror images. But the ending is subtle, a nice rejection of expected plot “surprises”. It was another highlight of the book. ( )

An interesting and varied bunch of stories, although some of them didn't work for me and a couple of them, in my opinion, don't fit under the "horror" category. Nevertheless, I did enjoy about two thirds of the stories included here and I would recommend this book to any horror lover. The highlights for me personally were the James Everington, Paul Finch, Daniel McGachey, Reggie Oliver (WLove and DeathW) and V. H. Leslie stories.
Thanks to LibraryThing and NewCon Press for the ARC of this title. ( )

Johnny Mains has resurrected his annual collection of short stories for the Best British Horror 2018 edition. This volume contains seventeen tales that are truly eclectic and prioritize classic horror themes of irony and psychological dread over gore. Settings span from gothic 19th century to futuristic science fiction, urban to isolated locales. The collection has something to please all horror fans: haunted houses, cursed objects, Lovecraftian creatures, doppelgangers, ghosts and transfigured humans. As in any collection, there are stronger and weaker entries, but each selection has obviously been curated with care-making Best British Horror 2018 a chilling and worthwhile read from beginning to end.

Thanks to Library Thing and NewCon Press for an ARC of this title in exchange for an unbiased review.

This is a solid horror collection, but most of the stories were a bit too predictable for my personal tastes. I haven't read that much British horror, so perhaps my expectations of the book were different than what they should have been going into it. They are very good standard horror stories. ( )