Mysterious, giant cigarettes on the side of the road. Screams in the night that rouse strangers from personal nightmares. Mysterious encounters and hard fought battles that awaken self doubt and threaten annihilation. Horror comes in many forms. Within these pages, you’ll explore cosmic horror, body horror, existential horror, ghouls, ghosts, and unrelenting beasts. Have fun, feel fear, and be thankful you don’t live in any of the worlds represented. At least, not yet.
Dark bleatings, my awesome tribe. Today we’re looking at a short story collection that leans quite heavily into the darker side of horror (mwahahahah!). Generally speaking, it was a bit of a mixed bag for me. Some of the stories really weren’t my cup of tea. However, the stories that did appeal to me, I absolutely LOVED. And there are two in particular that I want to talk about here:
THE VOTE
Holy cripes, this one scared the bejeesus out of me in a very “our society doesn’t even feel like it’s that far off this” type of way. It’s a grim, dark, dystopian look at society and, in particular, the process of the “democratic” vote. Something that I discuss often (in life, not in reviews so much!) is my fear that though we (in the UK) technically exist as a democracy, we’re actually sliding more towards living under the illusion of it. We can vote freely, but our votes are heavily influenced by people who received better education than the majority of us, are trained in public speaking and debates, and have received media training. And (and this is the worst part for me), they’re demonstrable liars, and demonstrably of poor and untrustworthy character, and this disturbs me because while, yes, we can freely choose who to vote for come election day, despite everything we have suffered, the people pricing us out of our own lives keep convincing us to keep them in power (by “we” I mean the majority vote). Last year, we basically lost our right to protest, and no one batted an eyelid. This story for me, is a few leaps ahead of where we are now, and it gave me the chills.
IN DEFIANCE OF BEING ALONE
Gave me the chills for completely different but equally horrifying reasons. A man is all alone in the world, as far as he knows, except for Ally, who he has never met but had been in communication with since the world ended (I assume). What starts as a glimpse into a bitterly lonely future, but one that still holds hope and potential, very quickly slides into… well… complete and utter despair. It rocked me, made me feel all chilly inside.
I guess there’s sort of a theme to my favourites here – I definitely think that JP Behrens has a particularly effective flair for dystopian themes and concepts, and the huge range of possibilities and emotions that can fall under that banner. I would absolutely love to see more horror of this ilk from them!
I’d definitely recommend this to fans of this author’s work, and to horror fans who enjoy feeling a thin layer of ice creep over your flesh as you read. If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
Leave a comment