After the critical success of After Sundown and Beyond the Veil, editor Mark Morris returns with Close to Midnight, a third horror anthology for Flame Tree Press, which brings together works commissioned from established writers of horror and speculative fiction (such as Ramsey Campbell, Alison Moore and Alison Littlewood) and tales chosen from entries to an open submission. The advantage of a non-themed collection is that it allows for a great variety of writing which shows what a rich genre horror is – ranging from the scary to the unsettling, from body horror to Aickmanesque weird, from realism to fable and fantasy. And there’s high literary quality in these pages – suffice it to say that Jen Ashworth’s Flat 19 was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2022. ( )

Creepy.................
Close To Midnight by Mark Morris is an anthology series which features some critically acclaimed authors. Some of the stories are really creepy enough to scare you out. The climax of all the stories are really very different. Horror fans are definitely going to like it. But, I would not say that it was the best one as some stories disappointed me. I was expecting more from them.

So, I would like to give the book 3 stars. Thanks to Netgalley for providing me an opportunity to read and review the book. ( )

Perhaps not quite as strong overall as the earlier anthologies, this is still a solid collection of stories, with some great authors included. There was one story I couldn't finish reading. I could see what was going to happen and couldn't bear it. I skipped through enough to know, yep, I can't do that one. ( )

Close to Midnight, edited by Mark Morris, is a very good selection of horror stories. Though un-themed as a collection, many of the stories, as Morris points out in his introduction, deal with loss.

These stories are all quite good, though as with any collection there are some that work better for me and some that don't. An old professor of mine used to use key phrases when getting students to write about literature and popular culture. For horror, our journal entries were to respond to the question: where's the scare? For many of the stories here answering that question led me to ponder both what makes us tick as well as how we have come to fear the things in life we fear. Even, maybe especially, when there is no real need to fear and we would be reluctant to label it as such.

Like science fiction, the best horror usually holds a mirror up to our society and ourselves. These stories, for the most part, do that. And, more import perhaps, they entertain. Can't ask for much more than that from a collection of short stories.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )