Goodreads Synopsis: A newborn’s absent face appears on the back of someone else’s head, a filmmaker goes to gruesome lengths to achieve the silence he’s after for his final scene, and a therapist begins, impossibly, to appear in a troubled patient’s room late at night. In these stories of doubt, delusion, and paranoia, no belief, no claim to objectivity, is immune to the distortions of human perception. Here, self-deception is a means of justifying our most inhuman impulses–whether we know it or not.
I picked up this book because it was one of the nominees for last year’s Goodreads Choice Awards, and if there’s one thing about the awards that I love it’s finding out about books that I hadn’t heard of before.
This is a collection of short stories, all horror themed and I was hooked from the beginning. I was a bit surprised by how short the stories were, but they all left me with that little bit of chill crawling up my spine. Just enough that I enjoyed it, not too much that I couldn’t sleep at night. 😉
Some of my favorite stories in the collection were Leaking Out, Wanderlust, and The Tower. The worlds that Evenson creates are bizarre and otherworldly. They draw you in and surprise you. I did feel that some of the stories in the middle were a bit weak, and not quite as creepy as I had hoped they would be. In particular Room Tone and Trigger Warning were my least favorite.
All in all I would recommend this collection if you’re a fan of horror, of if you’re looking to get into the genre. It’s a good collection if you’re not sure how much you actually want to be scared because there are different levels of creepy. In the end I gave it 4 stars.
This was a good review. Now I’m quite curious about this anthology.
Thank you! Hope you get around to reading it. 🙂