If you stare into the dark…
Step into the shadows and embrace the macabre in this chilling collection of novellas. Unearth a tale or two: a witch’s curse, a boy with a thirst for revenge, a beast protecting a rural idyll, and a sinister work of art revealing hidden horrors. These haunting stories explore both the natural and the supernatural, where the only certainty is a lingering sense of dread that will torment your dreams long after you’ve turned the final page.
Includes:
The Granton Witch: a small, Sussex village comes face to face with a four-hundred-year-old curse that the people of Granton thought was just old folklore, never once believing it could turn into a terrifying reality.
Bestial: an abused boy with a keen intellect and a passion for collecting creepy-crawlies enacts revenge on his tormentors in the unlikeliest of ways with the help of a strange man.
The Clearing: a group of hapless drug dealers thrown into hiding confront a deadly force of nature.
The Taking of Jacob Sturridge: a man studying for his degree gets more than he bargained for after he acquires a rare piece of art.
Dark bleatings, my lovely tribe! Hey, psst, you like novellas? I have 4 of them right here for you, and all in one book! Let’s take them story by story.
THE GRANTON WITCH
When a guy picks up a woman broken down on the side of the road, he realises quickly that she might not be in the situation he initially assumed. From there, we get a lot of throat slitting, blood, and localised terror of the supernatural variety.
I’ll be honest that although I initially really liked this, I ended up not liking it much overall. It felt too long, as in it was dragging a bit for me, because although I love a good kill as much as the next guy, the killing itself was quite repetitive and samey and I felt like it either needed a bit more creativity in this aspect, or just needed to be condensed a little bit.
I wasn’t super excited to carry on with the book, but needn’t have worried because I loved the following stories, so this first one was the exception for me.
BESTIAL
This story went in such a bizarre and unexpected direction and I loved it. A boy has a hobby and certain interests. The kind of interests that you see in the history sections of those true crime serial killer documentaries. One day, he’s befriended by a man who seems to just implicitly “get” this kid, and even offers him a fun new tool to use. The story goes into some truly weird but excellent scifi-ish territory and I am obsessed with it. Felt like one of the weirder, old-school Stephen King ideas (my favourite type of King oddness!).
THE CLEARING
A group of criminals, who just very much did not quite pull off the perfect crime, flee to a cabin in the woods that one of them knows about. One condition of visiting this place is that you can’t bring anything bad to it. Unfortunately for our group, they have a body in the trunk. The author utilises the “trapped in a cabin” trope whilst simultaneously subverting your expectation of why they’re trapped. It was such a fresh take on this type of story and I loved the lore.
THE TAKING OF JACOB STURRIDGE
This one has a gothic horror tone with a bright flair of cosmic horror mixed in with it. A man buys a painting and immediately starts hearing whispers and other creepy stuff. Things get stranger still when a man claiming to be the artist turns up at his door demanding the painting back, only the buyer knows that the artist has been dead a while. I can’t elaborate into what I loved most without spoilers but this story has a great climax with great imagery.
Overall, despite not loving the first story, I really enjoyed and would recommend this collection to horror fans. Each story sets a different tone and atmosphere, and tackles different angles of the horror genre. If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
A SEASON OF HORRORS: FOUR NOVELLAS
Bleeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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