A review by joecam79
At the Cemetery Gates: Year One by Joseph Sullivan, John Brhel
4.0
First of all, I'd like to thank John Brhel (co-author with Joseph Sullivan of this anthology) for sending me an electronic copy for review purposes.
"At the Cemetery Gates" is a collection of short, punchy horror tales. A unifying thread is provided by the small-town setting common to most of the stories, with the cemetery of the title hovering in the background like a haunting presence. The featured stories have a modern feel to them, although "The Girl with the Crooked Tooth" is an homage to Poe, and there are a couple of other tales dealing with death and obsession of which the old master would surely approve. I felt however that the strongest influence behind these tales comes from contemporary popular culture and TV shows. In fact, the authors themselves state in the introduction that the stories reinterpret urban myths and folklore. And so, besides hauntings of a more traditional type, we also come across weird angels, time travelling, a haunted time-lapse photo, government conspiracies, poisonous plants, werewolf-like monsters and masked serial killers.
The stories are not pretentious at all and, rather than adopting a "literary" approach, the authors prefer to concentrate on providing a satisfying narrative, more often than not with a twist in the tail/tale. Some of the stories are more ambitious in that they manage to portray interesting characters despite their brevity (for instance, I liked the interaction between the two brothers in "Delaying Decay").
Rather different from the rest of the stories is is "The Call is Coming from Inside the House". This is a Gothic pastiche with recognizable tropes of the genre (rambling mansion, black magic, a vulnerable young woman and even a lascivious monk) - its brief sections could well be expanded into a sort of modern-day Gothic spoof.
If you want your horror entertaining, this collection is well worth a read.
"At the Cemetery Gates" is a collection of short, punchy horror tales. A unifying thread is provided by the small-town setting common to most of the stories, with the cemetery of the title hovering in the background like a haunting presence. The featured stories have a modern feel to them, although "The Girl with the Crooked Tooth" is an homage to Poe, and there are a couple of other tales dealing with death and obsession of which the old master would surely approve. I felt however that the strongest influence behind these tales comes from contemporary popular culture and TV shows. In fact, the authors themselves state in the introduction that the stories reinterpret urban myths and folklore. And so, besides hauntings of a more traditional type, we also come across weird angels, time travelling, a haunted time-lapse photo, government conspiracies, poisonous plants, werewolf-like monsters and masked serial killers.
The stories are not pretentious at all and, rather than adopting a "literary" approach, the authors prefer to concentrate on providing a satisfying narrative, more often than not with a twist in the tail/tale. Some of the stories are more ambitious in that they manage to portray interesting characters despite their brevity (for instance, I liked the interaction between the two brothers in "Delaying Decay").
Rather different from the rest of the stories is is "The Call is Coming from Inside the House". This is a Gothic pastiche with recognizable tropes of the genre (rambling mansion, black magic, a vulnerable young woman and even a lascivious monk) - its brief sections could well be expanded into a sort of modern-day Gothic spoof.
If you want your horror entertaining, this collection is well worth a read.