A review by octavia_cade
Boy in Darkness and Other Stories by Sebastian Peake, Mervyn Peake, Joanne Harris

4.0

This collection of short fiction from Mervyn Peake has three forewords and six stories, which is an amusing ratio. The bulk of the collection, though, is made up of the novella "Boy in Darkness", which has previously been published separately (I read and reviewed one of those separate editions just recently). It's an outstanding piece of work, and I gave it five stars, so it's mildly unfortunate that it gets dragged down a little here by the other five creative pieces. All short stories, there's a couple that didn't really work for me - "The Connoisseurs" is non-genre and very slight, with an ending a blind man could see coming, and despite Peake's always interesting prose I simply couldn't get into "The Weird Journey". Of the rest, the other general fiction story here, "I Bought a Palm-Tree" is autobiographical and at least mildly amusing. However both "Danse Macabre" and "Same Time, Same Place" are excellent, being both tinged with the bizarre and just flat-out creepy. Given that "Boy in Darkness" is as much horror as fantasy, it seems to me it would have been more sensible to pair it with stories like the last two, rather than diluting the emotional effect with palm trees and old vases.