Scary Stories

 

I read 'Care of Wooden Floors' back in 2013 (go back and read that, I used to write proper reviews😐), and it was one of my best books of the year, probably *the best*. So 'The Anechoic Chamber' by Will Wiles is new out and I was excited to read it. While the stories are excellently clever, I don't like horror/ghost stories so some of them did not float my boat ... and they were not good for bedtime reading. I don't like being frightened, and there is a very fine line between disturbing and frightening.

While I did enjoy (just disturbing enough) the title story, and 'The Acknowledgements', that I started reading thinking it was the actual acknowledgments, the one that I enjoyed most was 'Moths', about a man sorting through family photographs after his father's death, an interesting tale of family dynamics with a hint of mystery:

"After Mum died four years ago, the photography tailed off. Everything tailed off. Had it been about her, all the time? He kept a photograph Blu-Tac'd inside the little bureau he used as a desk at home: Mum, in the mid 1970s, before any of us were born, sitting on a grassy slope with her knees up, a wide unguarded smile on her face, and a strand of brown hair blowing across her eyes, which are closed. Quite an 'arty' shot, now I think about it, but it was without a doubt Dad's favourite. By the mid 1990s, this exposure had faded quite badly, and Dad was able to find the correct negative and make a new print. That was an unanswerable vindication of his photo hoarding, and afterwards there was no question of him throwing anything away." (p.106)

Stay safe. Be kind. Don't forget it's Banned Books Week ... I did!