Dark bleatings, my gorgeous tribe! I’m here to talk about another book in the Shadows collection from Black Shuck Books today, and I’m excited about it. Phil Sloman is, in my humble opinion, an excellent short story writer. All the books in this collection are themed by the individual authors, so I assumed going in that this one centred around emotional struggles and/or mental health. Let’s take a look!
Broken on the Inside
What a story! A girl has been seeing doctors for years for an illness that hasn’t been diagnosed. She’s a graduate and lives with her mum. She has an experimental treatment that involves AI being surgically put in that alerts her if something is physically wrong. This seems like a great idea to me, and a terrifying one. Something that indicates any ill health at the first sign would be wondrous but would you want AI embedded in you like that? I don’t know if I could do it. Inevitably, because this is horror after all, it goes awry. I love this story – it has all the elements of a great Black Mirror episode.
Discomfort Food
What starts as what seems like an odd and funny horror story about a woman who hears the cries of “murderer” from the food she’s eating, swiftly turns into a layered psychological nightmare. I simply could not believe that such a comical concept became so dark. Excellent story, and excellent story telling, too.
The Man Who Fed the Foxes
A guy only has his wife but she cheats on him after 30 years with a new friend of theirs and never comes back. He lets everything go, including his precious garden. He’s lonely, his only visitor a nosy neighbour he can’t stand, oh – and the foxes that have started turning up. He’s feeding them, you see.
An entirely different kind of psychological horror that in some ways towards the end reminded me of The Yellow Wallpaper.
The Was an Old Man
This is great. A health conscious hypochondriac ingests a fly and becomes increasingly more concerned and convinced that it’s alive and doing stuff within him. He gets more and more unhinged and obsessed with getting it out. It’s increasingly stressful to read and hit home in a slightly funny way for me. There was a time in my life where I’d had the fear of God put into me about germs to the extent that I was afraid of someone with a virus brushing my car as they walked past, so then naturally when I opened the door I’d pick up something deadly. I know I know – that’s…well…totally paranoid and a bit crazy. But being able to laugh about that now does nothing for Past Kayleigh, who was quite convinced the germs were out to get her. I sympathised with this guy!
Virtually Famous
My least favourite because I was confused, though I think that’s the point. Chet is the famous face of an AI game that people play, and he’s so well known that in real life he has stalkers and it’s a problem. But a line is blurring and he wants it to end, so he plugs in to play to murder his own avatar. This is a mind-bending story, the Inception of stories, really.
Overall, a 5/5 read for me. Every story is unique, and each of them do explore the darker sides of the human psyche and how much our own brains can trick and deceive and panic us, logic be damned. I think my favourite thing about this in its entirety is that Phil’s writing is so engaging that I kept forgetting the theme of the book until the punchline of each story was revealed, so I never predicted where anything might end.
Another thing I’d like to add is that, if you know me or my site, you’ll probably all know that my biggest pet peeve in horror fiction is lazy use of mental health to create villains or plots. I see it done badly and disrespectfully much more often than I see it used for a real purpose. I loved every angle that Phil approached this concept from in this collection. There was not one moment in any of the stories that I rolled my eyes at what the problem turned out to be.
It’s an excellent collection that I wholeheartedly recommend. If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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