After finishing Brennan LaFaro's horror anthology Illusions of Isolation, I went straight into Kayleigh Dobbs book The End. This turned out to be another horror anthology, something I was happy to discover. This is the thirty fifth book in the Black Shuck Shadows series, which a Google search reveals to be a series of pocket-sized books. At around one hundred and twenty four pages I swiftly read through this in about a week and enjoyed nearly my whole time with it.
A good anthology always needs a good theme, and the theme with this collection (as the title may imply) is the apocalypse. The six stories here are all stand-alone ones, yet there are a few cheeky references throughout to events of earlier stories, while they are all separate tales, they follow a natural path from pre-apocalypse to the end of all things. It begins with 'The Claim They Stake' that has what can only be described as a blistering start, as a man flees from the house of an elderly man for reasons initially unknown. This uses a real world tin-foil hat conspiracy as the basis for the horror, with it kept a bit vague for the most part whether the protagonist is suffering from mental health issues or if he has actually stumbled onto a hidden truth.
'Just Like Baking' wasn't my favourite of the shorts contained here but it was amusing with how it all played out. A group of teenage acting witches (despite them being hundreds of years old) are planning a relatively safe spell, but their plans go wrong due to the arrival of a younger witch whose mother has insisted be included in the group. I thought this had a great ending to it.
Finishing up the first half of The End is 'Catch Fire'. A loving husband and wife go to the home of the wife's awful sister where they stumble into the plans of a twisted cult leader. This was a bit of a cruel one, mainly because I liked the protagonists and so wanted things to work out well, it did have a darkly humorous last line of dialogue.
'Just Like Baking' wasn't my favourite of the shorts contained here but it was amusing with how it all played out. A group of teenage acting witches (despite them being hundreds of years old) are planning a relatively safe spell, but their plans go wrong due to the arrival of a younger witch whose mother has insisted be included in the group. I thought this had a great ending to it.
Finishing up the first half of The End is 'Catch Fire'. A loving husband and wife go to the home of the wife's awful sister where they stumble into the plans of a twisted cult leader. This was a bit of a cruel one, mainly because I liked the protagonists and so wanted things to work out well, it did have a darkly humorous last line of dialogue.
'Dead' is the most comedic story of the lot, and an idea I hadn't seen (read I guess) before in zombie fiction. It begins with the protagonist being killed by a zombie she accidentally frees from the basement of her new house. Her ghost is then stuck following around her now resurrected undead body as it leaves the house and begins a zombie apocalypse, with the ghost getting increasingly exasperated at the ridiculous unfolding situation as well as the stupidity of all the people the zombie encounters. This could have been a traumatic story written in the right way, but the humour here made that not the case, and was all the better for it.
I thought The End had reached its highpoint with the previous story, but penultimate one 'Omega' was somehow even better. It manages to blend jet black comedy with legitimate horror. In this one, it appears that the end of the world is coming. A dedicated woman and her church group have been promised by their beloved pastor that they will be saved by God and will ascend to Heaven, but things aren't exactly as they seem. I have a real fear of heights, so I think that played a part in why picturing this in my head was almost making me sweat!
'The End' closes out the anthology and acts more like an epilogue to the anthology as a whole rather than a proper story. At just a few pages long this is written from the viewpoint of something not from the world of humans. The way it is written and set-out made this feel almost like a poem.
'The End' closes out the anthology and acts more like an epilogue to the anthology as a whole rather than a proper story. At just a few pages long this is written from the viewpoint of something not from the world of humans. The way it is written and set-out made this feel almost like a poem.
I thought this was a great little collection of stories, and I really liked the way Dobbs injected these with humour in a way that didn't distract. Some of these were a little predictable with where they headed, but for the most part I loved this, especially 'Dead' and 'Omega' which both delighted and surprised me. It may be short, but The End was also sweet, with a lot of enjoyment coming from reading it.
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