Reviews

Crooked Houses by Reggie Oliver, Rebecca Lloyd, Carly Holmes, Rebecca Kuder, John Gale, Helen Grant, Timothy Granville, Mark Beech, Colin Insole, Katherine Haynes, David Surface, Jane Jakeman, Richard Gavin, Steve Duffy, Lynda E. Rucker, Mark Valentine, Albert Power

lakserk's review against another edition

3.0

A physically imposing collection of weird/horror stories focusing on menacing buildings. As is usual with collections, the material is a bit uneven and thematically oscillating - there are a lot of different takes on the haunted house motif. However, (as other reviewers have noted) most of the stories feel that they're using the house just as background decor - with slight tweaking they could very well be inserted in a collection with a different theme. My main issue is that I expected to see houses, not humans, as protagonists; unfortunately this was rarely the case here.

The stories that truly stood out for me were: Colin Insole's "The Shepherd's House" (a folk horror-ish story which I would love to see expanded), Lynda E. Rucker's utterly frightful "Miasmata," James Doig's "At Lothesley, Montgomeryshire 1910" (my personal favourite, a James-ian rural tale), and Rebecca Lloyd's "In Cromer Road" (a weird folkloric take on the haunted house motif).