Tracy Fahey

This review first appeared on scifiandscary.com. I received a free copy of the book to review.

‘The Unheimlich Manoeuvre’ is a beguiling, unsettling collection of short stories that’s well worth your time if you have a taste for subtle, creepy horror. The 13 tales it contains are well written and varied enough to keep things interesting. Despite that variety, there are common themes running throughout the book that makes this feel like a well thought out, deliberate collection rather than the random hodgepodge that anthologies can sometimes be.
The stories are a mix of the out and out supernatural and what you might call tales of everyday madness, where apparently normal people do unspeakable things. There are ghostly doppelgangers, psychotic spouses, haunted houses and many, many things seen out of the corner of characters' eyes.
This is the horror of suspicion and doubt, where you don’t know if you can trust those around you or your own senses. At times it almost feels Lovecraftian, there is that same feeling of ever present threats lurking unseen in the shadows. Whilst there aren’t any direct ties between them, the stories all feel like they take place in the same universe. This creates a cumulative effect through the book, the terror of each story layering on that of the tales that precede it. It’s as if Fahey is painting different parts of a bigger picture with each story, and whilst that picture isn’t necessarily complete by the end of the book, the parts that are visible are terrifying.
The stories are also tied together by a sense of domesticity. The lives and environments that they revolve around are familiar and consistent. The women Fahey writes about (and the main characters are all women) are convincing and sympathetic. They feel like people you might know, and that makes the stories all the more chilling. It’s as if the events might be taking place in the house next door to you without you knowing.

Short stories can be hard to get right, but Fahey writes such brilliant openings that the reader is immediately pulled you into the narrative. Take these examples:

I’m writing the story of me and Charles Anderson. It’s a story from the year I turned twenty and went travelling. It’s a story of where we went and what came back.

On the third day she finds it on the attic wall. She’s in the middle of the slow but satisfying ritual of stripping wallpaper; first soaking, and then unpeeling back the thick flaps of flock wallpaper from the green-painted plaster beneath.

Ten days after. Everything in my life falls neatly into two divisions: before and after I saw something nasty in the woodshed.

Horror shorts can feel gimmicky, like elaborate shaggy dog stories that revolve around the final punchline, but Fahey’s never do. They leap off the page fully formed and the combination of enticingly creepy scenarios and believable characters is a winning one.
I’ve quite deliberately not gone into detail about any of the individual stories here, because I liked them so much I don’t want to risk spoiling them for you. Suffice it to say that this was the best collection of horror shorts I’ve read this year - it’s convincing, gripping, chilling and filled with a wonderfully macabre imagination.… (more)