The Alchemy Press Book of Horrors

The Alchemy Press Book of Horrors

by Peter Coleborn (Editor), Jan Edwards (Editor), Ramsey Campbell

Strange stories and weird tales and all of the creeping horrors in between. Horrors 2 features seventeen fabulous writers, including Sarah Ash, Paul Finch, John Grant, Nancy Kilpatrick, Garry Kilworth, and Samantha Lee... to lead you on a spine-tingling tour from seaside towns to grimy cities, to the lonely and secret places, from the fourteenth precinct to Namibia... and so many places in between.

Genres: Short Stories, Horror

394 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2018

Reviews

[Karl]

This is the first volume in a projected annual series.

Twenty-five tales of horror and the weird, stories that encapsulate the dark, the desolate and the downright creepy. Stories that will send that quiver of anticipation and dread down your spine and stay with you long after the lights have gone out.

Contents:

009 - Ramsey Campbell - "Some Kind of a Laugh"
027 - Storm Constantine - "La Ténébreuse"
049 - Samantha Lee - "The Worm"
061 - Stan Nicholls - "Deadline"
081 - Marie O’Regan - "Pretty Things"
091 - Gary McMahon - "Guising"
103 - Peter Sutton - "Masks"
109 - Debbie Bennett - "The Fairest of them All"
129 - Mike Chinn - "Her Favourite Place"
145 - Phil Sloman - "The Girl with Three Eyes"
155 - Tina Rath - "Little People"
165 - Madhvi Ramani - "Teufelsberg"
181 - Jenny Barber - "Down Along the Backroads"
191 - James Brogden - "The Trade-up"
203 - Marion Pitman - "The Apple Tree"
215 - Tony Richards - "The Garbage Men"
235 - Stephen Laws - "Get Worse Soon"
261 - Ralph Robert Moore - "Peelers"
279 - Gail-Nina Anderson - "An Eye for a Plastic Eye-ball"
291 - Keris McDonald - "Remember"
303 -Adrian Cole - "Broken Billy"
323 - Cate Gardner - "The Fullness of Her Belly"
335 - Suzanne Barbieri - "In the Rough"
347 - Ray Cluley - "Bluey"
367 - John Grant - "Too Late"
393 - Author Notes

All stories copy-write 2018

Interior art by Jim Pitts

Cover art by Peter Coleborn

[David A. Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anthologies like this used to be commonplace once, back in the day when they were a regular part of the output by major publishers like Pan, New English Library, Sphere Books and Corgi, etc., often by editors like August Derleth, Peter Haining, Kurt Singer, Michel Parry and others. Today it is virtually only the small independent presses that keep the flag flying, though few come close to The Alchemy Press Book of Horrors for giving us such a bumper crop in nearly 400 pages of 25 outstanding stories. Congratulations must be offered to the editors for achieving this!

It would, I’m afraid, be too lengthy a task to discuss every single story, and some worked for this reader better than others, though I would vouch for there not being a single dud amongst them, so I will just highlight a few that I particularly liked. Ramsey Campbell reliably opens proceedings with Some Kind of a Laugh, which is different to but inevitably brings to mind his brilliant novel The Grin of the Dark, where laughter becomes menacing and the make-believe world of entertainment hides a terrifying horror. Samantha Lee goes visceral with a vengeance with The Worm, which would have been a worthy entry into any of the old Pan Books of Horror (of which she was once a contributor!) Marie O’Regan’s Pretty Things very soon belies its name, where masks play a key, sometimes gut-wrenching part. I’ve always enjoyed Mike Chinn’s stories, and Her Favourite Place, which is SF horror, is one of his best, set in an undersea farm. Tony Richards’ The Garbage Men has an engrossingly claustrophobic nightmare effect and a great climax. It’s a while since I read anything new from Stephen Laws but Get Worse Soon is a cleverly plotted tale about an overly thrifty pound shop customer who literally gets more than he bargained for! It’s a very cleverly told tale. Scarecrows are often frightening creations, and Adrian Cole’s Broken Billy uses one to great and horrifying effect. John Grant’s Too Late shifts reality and perception of what is going on to great effect – and has a truly grand guignol twist at the end. These are just a few of the stories which for me stood out, though the standard throughout is consistently high. It is definitely one of the best anthologies I have come across for quite some time and I would highly recommend it.

If the stories weren’t enough, the book is also illustrated throughout with finely drawn headers for each of the stories by the talented Jim Pitts, adding that extra touch of quality to this book, which concludes with an informative set of Contributor Notes.

[Eamonn Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Alchemy Press Book Of Horrors’ is a large collection of modern weird tales. There are so many I’ll just have to pick out a few highlights. If a story isn’t mentioned, it doesn’t mean I didn’t like it, just that the review should be shorter than the book.

Like an army besieging a late medieval town, the editors brought out there biggest gun first: Ramsey Campbell. In ‘Some Kind Of A Laugh’, there’s a waiter in a small restaurant who bears a remarkable resemblance to a once-famous comedian and the restaurant owner wants him to use the comic’s catchphrases to entertain customers. Enough of them are old enough to get the joke. Then the comedian comes to do a show in town and the waiter goes to see him. Campbell is perhaps the most well-respected weird writer in England and I’ve enjoyed some of his work in the past but I must say this didn’t do a lot for me.

‘La Tenebreuse’ is the first story I’ve read by Storm Constantine and it was terrific. Some super-idle rich people stay in a large house in France and wait for the owner to show up. When he does, he’s as dashing as the female protagonist could hope. But there’s more to both of them than meets the eye. It was the style of this that I loved, the richness of language and imagery. There was some insight into character as well and not all of them were nice.

‘The Worm’ by Samantha Lee has a lady waking up to find a worm with teeth harassing her. Is it a figment of her imagination? Possibly, for she has been known to take mind-altering substances. As she battles the worm and remembers her rather beastly life experiences, we learn more about her. I enjoyed this and the manic stream of consciousness narrative style brought to mind some of Harlan Ellison’s work.

‘Masks’ by Peter Sutton is a sort of ‘Lord Of The Flies’ with adults. Shipwrecked on a barren island, where even fishing is impossible in the turbulent sea, the survivors, a mix of passengers and crew, must find a way to eat. The slow reveal of the situation is well done and the action rises efficiently. A story that strips away the thin veneer of civilisation.

Caitlin, aged fifteen, loses her virginity to a lout named Liam just before the start of ‘The Fairest Of Them All’ by Debbie Bennett. This one is split into days. On day one, she ponders the experience which gave her no pleasure except the self-esteem of being wanted. On day two, she tells her best friend, Hayley. A few days later, she starts vomiting and looking in the mirror sees a girl with a swelling belly. From the Kull story ‘The Mirrors Of Tuzun Thune’ by Robert E. Howard to Stephen Donaldson’s ‘The Mirror Of Her Dreams’, looking glasses have played a big part in fantasy fiction. This is a thoroughly modern addition to the sub-genre and sufficiently weird and scary to suit fans.

There’s also a long tradition of deep-sea Science Fiction, continued here by Mike Chinn. ‘Her Favourite Place’ features Clarrie and Lois, her wife, stationed two hundred metres underwater on Sea Farm Three. It’s a tough gig psychologically, due to the isolation and most couples don’t last more than four months. Now Lois wants to go back and Clarrie doesn’t. Then she finds strange white flowers in amongst the kelp beds they are studying. The characters are well-drawn, as is their close relationship, and there are some surprises. I think I would have preferred this as a straight SF story with explanations but authors choose what they think best. It still worked.

‘Teufelsberg’ by Madhvi Ramani concerns Christian Finkel, a disgraced journalist sacked from the ‘New York Times’ for inventing facts. Fake news! Half-German, he mopes about in Berlin for a while then comes across a story by accident. Many people have disappeared in a small town called Teufelsberg which translates as ‘Devils Mountain.’ Hoping to restore his reputation with a big scoop, he goes there to investigate. The story is a clever fictionalisation of the real Teufelsberg and the first-person narration makes the ending work beautifully.

A carload of people arrives at Marie’s, a garage and rest stop just clear of the Wilds where a few people have made a settlement. The Wilds is an area where worlds intersect and the flora is just as dangerous as the fauna. The worst things come out at night. Set in contemporary America, ‘Down Along The Backroads’ by Jenny Barber is almost worth reading just for the lilt of the prose but there’s a plot, too.

I really liked ‘The Trade Up’ by James Brogden. Charlie, a not very successful salesman, is cruising down the motorway at some ungodly hour of the night. It’s dark and raining. A car overtakes him that is a duplicate of his own, right down to the licence plate. He pulls level, looks across and sees his own face grinning back at him. The story develops nicely from this intriguing start and ends in a way I didn’t expect. I’ll keep an eye out for James Brogden stories in future.

There’s a magic song in ‘The Apple Tree’ by Marion Pitman, the devil’s work, perhaps. Julie is scraping a living as an editor. A man with ‘more money than skill was paying her to knock his novel into shape’. She’s become fascinated with a female ancestor from Dorset who collected old folk songs and even goes to her old house, now a charity shop, to hunt for the black box containing the rude ones she never dared publish. There’s a song called ‘The Apple Tree’ that should not be sung to a particular tune. The weird was okay here but the characters carried it off really.

Likewise for the seedy characters in ‘The Garage Men’ by Tony Richards. George Orwell lives again in the shape of Marcus, a posh Oxford boy renting a room in the Midlands town of Thaxtall to see how the other half live and write it up. Thaxtall will be his Wigan Pier. The kids sing a strange song about the garbage men coming to get you. The Americanism is odd for in the UK as we call them dustmen or refuse operatives in newspeak. The boogymen are pretty routine in this story but, again, it’s the real-life aspect that makes it work and the misfortunes of those reared on a sink estate with no ambition and no hope.

I loved ‘Get Worse Soon’ by Stephen Laws. Frugal Colin lives with his mum in a two-bedroom council house and is a devotee of pound shops, where every single item costs just ‘one sovereign pound’. His favourite is the Quidstore and he becomes so addicted he buys things he doesn’t need. One such purchase, from the stationery section, is a box of ‘Get Worse Soon’ cards, guaranteed to make the receiver die. A hilarious black comedy with a great ending.

According to Ezekiel 28:13, Lucifer was set with precious stones when he was created. A girl in a non-Christian culture is worshipped as a goddess when she starts to shed diamond tears. Then scientists investigate and decide she’s a fake, except one. When her skin starts to grow precious stones the mad Christians of the world decide she’s the incarnation of Lucifer and are out to kill her. ‘In the Rough’ by Suzanne Barbieri was remarkable for how long it kept going with new twists and turns. It worked despite the mad premise.

There’s a spate of creature features towards the end of the book featuring everyday objects coming to life and menacing the innocent. This is old hat really but still entertaining if done well. In ‘The Fullness Of Her Belly’ by Cate Gardner, it’s a collection of dolls accumulated by a woman who uses them to fake her yearned for pregnancy.

In ‘Broken Billy’ by Adrian Cole, it’s scarecrows. Once you made the giant leap of suspending your disbelief both of these were scary enough but my favourite was ‘Bluey’ by Ray Cluley. Mister Stevens, a teacher, makes a cardboard cut-out person, carefully ethnic and gender-neutral in blue cardboard and asks the troublesome class to insult it, which they do, then asks them how they think Bluey feels. He’s trying to teach them a lesson about empathy and bullying but it doesn’t turn out well. The ending felt a bit tacked on but most of it was great.

‘The Alchemy Press Book Of Horrors’ is a large collection of weird tales best taken in small doses. I took some big bites but there’s such a thing as a surfeit of strange and it loses its impact. All the stories are set in the present reality and much suspension of disbelief is required sometimes to swallow the premises but the best thing about them all was the detail of real modern life and its problems. When Mister Stevens in ‘Bluey’ was marking schoolboy essays he found this: ‘The supernatural is merely a device to emphasise human qualities and frailties’. That pretty much sums up the book.

Eamonn Murphy

[Hugo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Each story individually rated and reviewed below, but overall a middling and largely disappointing selection, with the bigger names offering their chaff, a lot of the contributions reading like first drafts of ill-thought-out and/or unoriginal ideas, and far too many which are either rushed summarisations or abbreviated openings to longer, one would dare hope, better stories.

I like to support the smaller presses, especially with their anthologies, but this collection isn't a worthwhile example. My overall feeling having finished it is 2/5 Stars (It Was OK) because that's the feeling it's left me, but the maths says this scores 71/125, so 3 it is.

Some Kind of a Laugh, by Ramsey Campbell: 2/5. A tale of personality sublimation, well characterised, if a little overfamiliar, and only vaguely a horror story; Campbell's often awkward prose style had me restarting almost a dozen sentences over again in order to glean their meaning.

La Ténébreuse, by Storm Constantine: 2/5. The sort of ambient genre story that could have been written at any point in the last forty years (even if it is written well), failing to make any great use of its French setting, and featuring yet another of Constantine's world-weary, pontificating protagonists.

The Worm, by Samantha Lee: 2/5. A confessional told in conversational stream-of-consciousness - difficult to achieve, as this story proves - with a narrative that reveals itself in stages, ultimately lacking in denouement or effect; a solid subtext, rationalising the titular worm, would improve this.

Deadline, by Stan Nicholls: 3/5. A strong study of the mutability and inconstant nature of modern life, as fixtures and assumed landmarks vanish and are replaced, and events blur one into the other; competently written, with neatly placed setups and payoffs, but overlong.

Pretty Things, by Marie O'Regan: 3/5. A fairly standard setup, featuring a character who doesn't realise he's in a cliched '90s Goth vampire story until it's too late, this takes a welcome Barker-esque twist towards the end, then doesn't really do anything with it, then ends.

Guising, by Gary McMahon: 2/5. A standard tale (one we've all read so many times before) of a character haunted, literally, by their past; the ghost of a body dumped on waste ground, wrapped in a winding sheet of dirty bubble-wrap, is an idea much better suited to a visual medium.

Masks, by Peter Sutton: 3/5. An island of accumulated castaways descends to savagery and ritualism, when providence provides; an interesting scenario, but completely without rationale or development, compounded by an ending which neither confounds or expounds on the setup.

The Fairest of Them All, by Debbie Bennett: 3/5. A kitchen sink drama of teen pregnancy, gradually - if a little inexplicably - developing into dark fantasy; some background - even the hoary old haunted mirror cliché, done subtly, might work, given the fairy tale theme - would have given this some structure and punch.

Her Favourite Place, by Mike Chinn: 4/5. At last, a story with some invention and a prose style - although written with too many exclamation marks and too few commas. An almost SF tale of underwater domestic strife and scientific exploration, escalating character drama to a nicely off-kilter and affecting finale.

The Girl With Three Eyes, by Phil Sloman: 3/5. An account of a paranoic's school shooting, neatly characterised by the prose of the first-person perspective; I say 'account' because there's little to no story here, and the writer seems content to recycle Bloch's classic "Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly..." as his ending.

Little People, by Tina Rath: 2/5. A divorcée and her daughter move to the country, where they encounter the titular little people in their new home; potential metaphorical themes of abandonment and self-harm are lost by evidential explanation, and a longer - likely better - tale is buried in this rushed synopsis with an abrupt and almost summarised ending.

Teufelsberg, by Madhvi Ramani: 2/5. An enjoyable setup in a curious location, with a strong central mystery of European folklore and an assured teasing of multiple subgenre potential, with strong moral shading and background for the protagonist; just as the story begins to approach a finale, it's all curiously wrapped up in a final page of almost bullet point curtness.

Down Along the Backroads, by Jenny Barber: 4/5. A post-apocalypse tale of encroaching forests and human mutation, with both cast and environment briskly and imaginatively drawn, but seeming like an opening chapter to a longer narrative; a higher score than I'm comfortable with, against my better judgement, but it's so very inventive and absorbing, if ultimately disappointing.

The Trade-Up, by James Brogden: 3/5. A doppelgänger tale, atmospherically set on the night-time motorways and service stations, and taking a much-appreciated left turn towards the end, but is otherwise perfunctorily written in the standard Cynical Sweary Brit vernacular which plagues most modern horror.

The Apple Tree, by Marion Pitman: 4/5. A well-characterised and told folk song horror, establishing characters and plot well within the brevity of a short story, but its very nature makes it somewhat predictable - despite its obvious invention - further let down by an almost cursory, and disappointing, open ending.

The Garbage Men, by Tony Richards: 2/5. A tale of rural myth, as a slumming would-be writer researching the working classes gets to close to the darkness; comes off as somewhat sneering of the 'Great Unwashed', and is - for all of its authorial protagonist - unremarkably written; almost this anthology's first 1/5 score, but for some invention in the denouement.

Get Worse Soon, by Stephen Laws: 3/5. A simple story, worthy of The Twilight Zone in its direct conceit and scope for possibility, diminished by stock characters and overly plain prose (including one paragraph so bad I had to read it three times); poor control of the finale pacing means the reader gets to the twist before the author does.

Peelers, by Ralph Robert Moore : 4/5. A story of a human subspecies finding love in one another, and presenting the monstrous as essentially human, yet ultimately not; a narrative skirting a larger world in a way that excites rather than frustrates, managing a great deal in relatively few pages, written with some assurance and style, and much invention.

An Eye For a Plastic Eye-Ball, by Gail-Nina Anderson: 3/5. Displaying a nice way with characterisation, both in text and dialogue, and paced well, this suffers from a title and set-up referencing an EC Comics-style 'Revenge From Beyond the Grave' tale, but fails to build up any real guilt or immoral action in its protagonist, deflating the ending.

Remember, by Keris McDonald: 1/5. A tale of mysterious abductions from an animal shelter; a monster did it. That's it; that's the story. Again with this anthology, plainly written to the point of anecdotal, and here consisting entirely of set-up and characters, but with barely any middle and no ending.

Broken Billy, by Adrian Cole: 4/5. A nicely paced mystery with evolving characterisation, though the scarecrows speaking (needlessly, for the most part) reduces the inherent creepiness; an entire middle section of the story appears to be missing, replaced with clumsy "As you know..." anecdotes, which, combined with the intimations of the ending, indicate a expanded version of this tale would be preferable.

The Fullness of Her Belly, by Cate Gardner: 3/5. A woman faking pregnancy with dolls and cushions makes for some unsettling scope in this psychological portrait, strengthened by some deft character work and stylish prose; undercut by some sillier fairy tale elements until the story writes itself into a corner and ends inconclusively.

In the Rough, by Suzanne Barbieri: 3/5. A globe-trotting story of a miracle, told in a sort of abbreviated summary of events, hugely truncating what could - perhaps should - have been a much longer story; inventive, sympathetic, thoughtful - hampered by a slightly over-earnest ending - but there's a much better novella in this material, which seems wasted here in this whistle-stop version.

Bluey, by Ray Cluley: 4/5. A teacher struggles with his class and issues of bullying, and the titular paper doll he creates to address this. Cluley's prose is clean and likeable, strong on character, and the pacing of this escalates intriguingly until a supernatural ending with no rationale finishes the story off poorly.

Too Late, by John Grant: 2/5. A story of Mediterranean fidelity, strongly reminiscent of a subgenre prevalent in the old The Pan Book of Horror Stories series, building slowly to a predictable ending and then somehow fumbling it with a confusing finale which doesn't make sense however you look at it.

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mammoth horror anthology of new stories, a book — as based on my experience — that creates the strong impression, from page 1 to page 391, of potentially becoming a great memorable example of such anthologies. And it is enhanced, for me, by the sense of a gestalt I found in it, whether intentional or not — a sense I hope I have managed to convey above. And, finally, if that were already not enough, it is perfected by the Jim Pitts adornments at the top of each story.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book of great stories and creative writers! If you love horror, this is a read you won't want to miss. Recommended.