I have a long list of horror books waiting to be read, some of which I've had down to read for over a decade. I recently finished reading Brennan LaFaro's horror anthology, Illusions of Isolation and briefly felt proud of myself that I had only received a copy of the book in March, until I realised I've had this since March of last year! Any regular visitor to this site will know that I love anthologies, and this particular one just so happens to be quite excellent.
I admit that when I read the preface by Jonathan Janz that I was more than a little sceptical when he stated there wasn't a single bad story to be found in the anthology. After all, it is very rare for a collection of short stories to not feature at least one dud. I found myself with egg on my face however, as thirteen stories later and there indeed was not a single bad one to be found. There was also a lot of variation with horrors ranging from evil spirits to home invasions, monstrous creatures, sci-fi, and even a fantasy Western. I loved this variation even if not all the stories were perfect.
Six of the stories feature a child or teenager as the protagonist or co-protagonist, with seven of them also focussing on the family dynamic, and a fair few mainly focus on just the one character for the majority of the story.
It begins fantastically with 'Dressed For Success', a second person perspective story about a boy's first day at a very strict school, whose pupils have just about reached the end of their respective tethers with their cruel treatment by the sadistic teachers. This feeds into the unsettling 'Piece by Piece' that has a school boy discovering strangely preserved body parts out in his local creek, and deciding to keep hold of them. Having horror from the perspective of a child often works well, children obviously much less designed to be able to deal with the frightening unknown. This can be seen again with the eco-terror 'The Last Little Piece of Civilization' in which an eight year old child discovers her home is slowly being taken over by an ever increasing jungle, something that her emotionally absent parents seem mostly oblivious to. One part of this book that I really adored was that the author provides his inspirations at the end of each story, in this case, the idea he had come up with was 'reverse deforestation', to give an idea of what it must feel like for animals to lose their habitats to human destruction.
Rather than the tone be the same for each of the short stories, there is effort to make them different in styles. 'Snap' is probably the shortest one here, a comedic entry about two evil bosses at a company who are joyfully planning how to kill off their staff members. 'The Irreversible Flow of Time' is a first person present tense tale that plays out like a level in a video game, complete with 'end of level' boss fight. The great 'I Will Meet You There' takes place on a space ship and has an interesting concept of taking place both in the present, as well as in the weeks and days leading up to just the one person being left alive on the ship. I loved how repeating sounds came to feel so chilling, even if I wasn't so keen on the slightly neat explanation towards the end. 'Just a Note' takes the form of a found footage style of notes written between a son and his mother, who are both experiencing supernatural events. A cool idea, though there seemed to be little difference in writing styles between the grown woman and her fourteen year old son, so the letters seemed to be a little to identical to read.
I was a little torn on what was my favourite of the stories, in the end I settled on two of them. 'Then You Smiled for a Second' was a great home invasion story with a delightfully cruel amusing end, the author stated this was inspired by the January 6th United States Capitol Building mob attack. I also loved final story (and the longest), 'Red Sands', a Western that had an isolated community being attacked by winged creatures, with two of the townsfolk deciding to set out across the barren desert and try and locate the creatures' nest. It was interesting to read afterwards that this was a stand alone prequel story to a dark fantasy series the author had written with someone else.
It is rare for there not to be a bad story in a collection like this, but while I had slight issues with how some of the stories resolved, such as the underwhelming finish to 'The Attic', I really enjoyed each of these, covering a variety of subjects, while the author's inspirations for each of these was fascinating to read. Illusions of Isolation was a great anthology that has made me want to check out more of the author's work.
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