In Samurai and Other Stories you'll find numerous ghosts, many Scotsmen, a big blob, some holy relics, some unholy relics, a Mothman, a barbarian, some swordplay, a shoggoth and people that nobody expects. This collection by William Meikle brings together stories from the past decade in an exploration of the perils of exploring dark places, both external and internal. "There is no doubt in my mind that Mr. Meikle is one of the premier storytellers of our time." - Famous Monsters of Filmland "Meikle is a writer that can grace the page with words of beauty whilst twisting a nightmare into grotesque shapes before your eyes." - Len Maynard and Mick Sims "William Meikle's short stories and novels are shining examples of what is missing in horror fiction today: atmospheric in style, old-school in character, with an intriguing story to be told." - David Wynn, Mythos Books
I'm a Scottish writer, now living in Canada, with more than thirty novels published in the genre press and over 300 short story credits in thirteen countries.
My work has appeared in a number of professional anthologies and I have recent short story sales to NATURE Futures and Galaxy's Edge. When I'm not writing I play guitar, drink beer and dream of fortune and glory.
Review of Kindle edition Publication date: January 21, 2014 Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing Language: English ASIN: B00HZRCI0G
A little Lovecraft, a little Poe and even some early David Drake all seem to have influenced this collection of horror stories. Some are pretty strong horror fiction while others are just macabre. All are entertaining for those who like this genre.
Anthologies are tricky. There is always that one (or two or three) story that messes up the whole thing. But, every now and then you stumble upon a collection that manages to be almost perfect. Now, you don't need much to like this one. It's is good. However, you do need to love lovecraftian themes to love it. Overall, there are sixteen stories in this anthology and they don't have one main theme. It's just like the title says - the first story is 'Samurai' and the rest follows. I loved it.
The themes range from greed to fear, jealousy and death, demons doing their thing - possessing or hunting people, warriors from various epochs fighting, some zombies and so many more.
SAMURAI Five out of fifty-five men end up on an island where they find treasure. Only one of them realises that they shouldn't touch it.
RICKMAN’S PLASMA A man invents something he cannot control. Humorous cosmic horror story if there ever was one.
HOME IS THE SAILOR ' The undead are at the door, and they’re worse than the bible-thumpers.' A story about a hotel with some very interesting guests.
TURN AGAIN This one didn't do much for me. It's sort of a bittersweet story.
INQUISITOR An inquisitor faces a shoggoth. You know it's good when it has a shoggoth, right?
THE SCOTSMAN’S FIDDLE A man comes to a mining town and plays enchanting music. Everyone loves it except the owner of the mine.
THE TOUGHEST MILE Awesome fantasy story. It is set in a fantasy world where a green-eyed witch is having fun watching gladiator-like fights between slaves and whatever animal, man or a monster she decides to throw at them. The toughest mile refers to the option given to anyone who wins a hundred fights. He has to stay alive on the ten-mile path and she will be waiting to give him his freedom.
THE HAVENHOME The story is told through journal entries from the personal journal of Captain John Fraser. His cargo vessel arrives in the New World hoping to find shelter, food and entertainment in a town they know should be full of people. But it's not empty.
THE YULE LOG A sad story about loss.
LIVING THE DREAM This one is tough to stomach because it features a stalker turned killer.
THE SHOOGLING JENNY I'm torn about this one only because it is about something I really despise. A man comes to a mining town to find the origin of a folk song. It seems the story wants us to take one side - the one I can't take. But the story is still good, though.
THE HAUNTING OF ESTHER COX After being almost raped, a young girl starts experiencing weird phenomena that become increasingly more dangerous with each new manifestation.
DANCERS A story told by a guilt-ridden old man.
THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE THORNS I would give this story an extra star only because it doesn't bash Christianity, which seems to be something a lot of people do today. Nobody will call you a *phobe. Don't get me wrong. This story features a great example of a hypocritical so-called Christian. It's the time of the Crusades and one nobleman is after a relic that will make them more powerful. As he often says to his men he is doing Lord's work, after all. When they find a place where the relic should be, it turns out it is something way more than they'd expected. The author gives Christianity his roots back in the way everything is resolved. I loved the story and the last line of it, which perfectly closes the tale: 'It was the Christian thing to do.'
THE YOUNG LOCHINVAR A girl who is supposed to marry a very unlikeable young man meets a mysterious man in Scotland.
A SLIM CHANCE A private detective gets a new client who dies the moment he tells his story. Now he can't rest until he finds out what really happened to the young man.
I didn't love every story equally. Some of them are just fine, but overall this is a very good collection.
Sixteen tales of horror and/or suspense from an author who has never managed to disappoint sounds like gold on paper. But I'm the first to admit short story collections are a hard sell for me. I'm not sure if it's because I rarely get the chance to warm enough to the characters in each tale, or whether it's that I rarely find the twists and turns surprising; whatever the reason, I struggle to enjoy short stories in the way I do novels and even novellas.
So it should come as no real surprise that I found Samurai and Other Stories from the reliable William Meikle to be a decent, but far from amazing, read. As with any collection, there were stories I did very much enjoy, but there were others that completely failed to resonate with me.
Of the former, the titular SAMURAI was a somewhat predictable, but nevertheless enjoyable, tale with a decent hero and nasty ship's captain who was easy to hate. In fact, like this one, most of the tales I enjoyed in Samurai and Other Stories were set in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. None were better than the excellent THE HAVENHOME, which managed to elicit some actual chills as it described the ill-fated final voyage of the titular ship in 1605. INQUISITOR was also a period set story and a great little Lovecraft pastiche that alternated journal entries from its two major characters to great effect. The one major present day story I liked was the collection's final entry, A SLIM CHANCE, which had a great premise and managed to say a whole heap in its short 15 pages. And there was THE TOUGHEST MILE, which would be at home in any collection of action-based fantasy tales.
On the other hand, I simply did not understand TURN AGAIN (both in terms of its content or what it was doing in such a collection), thought THE YOUNG LOCHINVAR was too bland a tale, and THE HAUNTING OF ESTHER COX seemed to be built on an all too obvious conclusion which rendered an otherwise fine tale ineffective. HOME IS THE SAILOR also left me cold as it aimed for an odd balance between comedy and horror which never quite worked.
It feels inauthentic to close on such a negative note, as this was a decent collection of short stories that did enough to earn my recommendation. And when it comes to short stories, that's no mean feat.
3 Characters Named Duncan in the First Half Dozen Stories Alone for Samurai and Other Stories.
Despite (or perhaps, due to) being one of the strongest and most prolific authors of our times, William Meikle’s short stories are scattered across so many anthologies & collections that it has been difficult to savour his shorter works on their own (i.e. not judging them with respect to works of others available in the same anthology, dealing with variants of the same theme). The present book would hopefully amend the situation. It’s a beautiful paperback free of typo-s. It has a page briefly mentioning the original anthologies where these stories had been published for the first time, but is unfortunately devoid of any Author’s Note concerning the backdrop/personal history of these stories. The stories included in this collection are: -
1. Samurai 2. Rickman’s Plasma 3. Home is the Sailor 4. Turn Again 5. Inquisitor 6. The Scotsman’s Fiddle 7. The Toughest Mile 8. The Havenhome 9. The Yule Log 10. Living the Dream 11. The Shoogling Jenny 12. The Haunting of Esther Cox 13. Dancers 14. The Brotherhood of the Thorns 15. The Young Lochinvar 16. A Slim Chance
Analysing each story would be unfair because that would mean giving away a large portion of their charms. I would simply like to state these stories cover a large spectrum, with history, mythos, grim reality, psychology, tropes deployed in classic ghost story, mythology: everything plays their part. Some of the more experimental ones missed me. Some of the more ‘Scottish’ ones failed to charm me. But the stories using history were very good indeed. And the two (why only two???) stories (“Home is the Sailor”, “A Slim Chance”) involving a hard-boiled, hard-drinking, sardonic, down-on-luck PI from Glasgow were fabulous. This collection is definitely worth repeat reading, and I can only hope that the author would, in a distant-yet-real future, write enough stories involving said unnamed PI, to give him his own collection. Recommended.
All sixteen of the tales in Samurai snd Other Stories have appeared elsewhere over the last several years, but are offered as a collected work for the first time and represent a fine sampling of short stories from Scottish born writer William Meikle.
If you're not yet familiar with Meikle's work you are missing out. With twenty novels and more than 300 short stories published to date, his impressive body of work continues to grow and Samurai and Other Stories offers an excellent introduction.
This collection starts with the title story of the surviving members of a shipwrecked crew discovering a temple with riches that would more than make up for their lost cargo. One problem, it's guarded by A powerful, unearthly Samurai. "Samurai" is a strong start and offers up a nice twist as do many of the tales in this collection.
Some of my favorites include "Rickman's Plasma", sort of a 21st century take on the horror classic The Blob. "Home Is the Sailor" features a walking dead scenario. There's "Inquistor", a Lovecraftian tale from the time of the inquisition. "The Havenhome" is a very well told story set in the early 1600s with appropriate language and a frightening adversary. But, my most favorite of all is, "The Haunting of Esther Cox," set in 1878 and told through a series of diary entries. From one such entry, "You may not believe any good of me. But if you believe nothing else, believe this. I ain't a bad girl."
There were a few stories that I didn't particularly enjoy, but they were very few and It's very rare that every story in a collection will knock it out of the park. Overall, Samurai and Other Stories is certainly worth your time and is available both as a paperback and ebook from Crystal Lake Publishers and Amazon.com.
This was a very entertaining collection of short stories from an author I had been wanting to read for a while. The collection is like most collections with some stories better than others but most are very well done. There was only one story I didn't care for (I think it was Living the Dream) because it contained explicit sex and violence that none of the other stories had and therefore seemed out of place in the collection. I liked the title story and Mr. Meikle did show he can write in many different genres considering the varied themes of this collection.
Overall a great collection of mostly horror stories that I would recommend to anyone who likes horror short stories in the classic tradition.
First horror read of the year and a surprisingly enjoyable one. Took a while to get into these stories, either that or the second half was just more to my liking. Most of these stories, like their author, are very Scottish and there is a inordinate amount of Duncans and Ians, although oddly enough no Glens. But they were imaginative, original and quite diverting. At times this collection put me in mind of M.R. James, had he been more readable and less dense and soporific. No particular stand outs here, nothing mind blowing per se, but a fairly even level of entertainment was maintained throughout. Fun very quick read. Recommended for genre fans.
1 - Samurai 27 - Rickman’s Plasma 37 - Home is the Sailor 57 - Turn Again 63 - Inquisitor 77 - The Scotsman’s Fiddle 85 - The Toughest Mile 107 - The Havenhome 143 - The Yule Log 147 - Living the Dream 165 - The Shoogling Jenny 173 - The Haunting of Esther Cox 199 - Dancers 207 - The Brotherhood of the Thorns 233 - The Young Lochinvar 243 - A Slim Chance
Samurai and Other Stories is a reading experience nobody with a liking for the darker genres should miss. The tales in this marvelous collection contain elements of the darkest horror, fantasy, hauntings, suspense and adventure. Although all the stories are written by one extremely versatile author, the variety of tales range from adventures set in historical times to incidents that happen in the here and now. Most of the stories involve the Scottish people, their songs and folk lore.
In several stories we discover that it isn't at all a good idea to rob temples, mess with religious relics or invade lands belonging to people with magical powers. For those who like a good zombie adventure; this book will more than satisfy you. Add to this an end-of-the-world story, a thoroughly spooky Christmas, spirit possession and a look into the terrifying mind of a crazed stalker and you have an anthology where each story is a refreshing adventure.
My favorite stories are an extremely suspenseful tale of a hero and his perseverance, and a slightly twisted rescue by what may just have been an angel. Fortunately several of the stories have a satisfying and sometimes, even positive, outcome. These satisfying and positive endings do not detract from the general suspenseful and often thoroughly horrifying nature of the book.
The author takes a look at the devastating and very literal result of binding deals and how obsession and guilt can turn into a nightmare.
For a read that will thrill, horrify, amaze, elate and sometimes even make you laugh out loud, I highly recommend this brilliant collection of short stories by William Meikle. (Ellen Fritz)
First of all, I'm insanely jealous of William Meikle's productivity. He's one of the most prolific writers I know. In fact, in the time it's taken to me write this review and post it, he's probably already written and sold five or six pro=pay short stories.
Anyway.
This is a really solid collection of stories running the gamut from Conan-like fantasy to ghost stories, Lovecraftian/weird fiction and swashbuckling adventure. There really is no modern equivalent of Robert E. Howard, but that's definitely the vibe you get reading Meikle's work. Highly recommend this, and the five hundred other short stories he's probably managed to write and sell in the last five minutes...
Great selection of stories. Everything from gothic horror to swords and sorcery, William Meikle has you covered. The Toughest Mile, The Inquisitor and Brotherhood of the Crown were some standouts amongst other gems.
The first two tales in this collection are obviously full of talent, but mostly I found it not what I prefer, for I'm into reading brutal horror tales. Yet the man can obviously write, and it wasn't disappointing.
I'd go with 3 1/2 stars if that was an option, I bumped it up to 4 because there were a couple of stories I really liked a lot. I have to be honest, I got about half-way through this anthology and set it aside thinking I wasn't going to finish it. Not because the stories were poorly written, but most of them had a "been there, read that" feel to me. Going back online and looking at some other reviews prompted me to keep reading and I'm glad I did, there are some really good stories in the second half. There's a nice mix here between subtle and graphic, current and...I can't think of the word. Old timey. Let's go with that.
okay.. more so 2.5 stars. I just couldn't get "into" most of the stories in this book. it's getting 2.5 stars because there were just a handful that I liked, or thought were considered "creepy". I hate giving books low ratings and don't like going below a 3, but I just can't with this..
I enjoyed most of the stories until I hit "Living the Dream." That... was when I stopped reading. The story was one of the most offensive stories I've ever read, with no redeeming value whatsoever. The samurai story? Great. The one with the shipwrecked crew? Awesome. But this one? I'm sorry, it was too much, and I'm done with the set. Time to move onto some classic Alfred Hitchcock stories to help clear the cobwebs...
Very good collection of (mostly) horror stories, some with Lovecraftian themes. I especially liked "Dancers", a beautifully written, very sad tale of the ghost of an English girl from the time of World War II, left forever waiting for an American airman who will never return.
This is a horror compendium. It's not bad. There are some fantastic stories in here. Having picked it up for free on a Kindle deal, I will say that it was worth the price and an easy read for my Goodreads challenge, but not something I would seek out to read everyday.