Short horror stories aren’t just for Halloween, but they seem to suit autumn and winter evenings, a time of darkening skies, shortened days and slowly worsening weather. Edited by prolific horror writer Mark Morris, Elemental Forces is Flame Tree’s fifth collection of contemporary horror stories inspired by Morris’ love of the 1980s New Terrors horror short story series. Older readers though might well be stirred to remember Pan’s legendary and long-running 1960s Book of Horror series (edited by Herbert Van Thal!) whose lurid covers would send shivers down the spines of a generation of schoolboys too young to enjoy their bloodthirsty tales of terror.
Elemental Forces contains twenty new horror shorts of varying length, several by new writers and several by established names like Paul Tremblay, Poppy Z Brite, and Tim Lebbon. Naturally enough, they’re not so much concerned with the Gothic horror staples of decades past, but they’re much more rooted in today’s world, reflecting the very real concerns of an edgy, jittery, paranoid 21st century. But there’s quite literally something for every horror taste here. Fans of Lovecraftian monsters will revel in the likes of Laurel Nightower’s ‘Call of the Deep’ in which a ravening creature rises from murky depths to confound those tasked with keeping it at bay and in ‘Nobody Wants To Work Here Any More’ by Christina Henry something nasty and voracious lurks in the dark corners of a fast food restaurant’s freezer. There are subtler terrors too; the opening story ‘The Peeler’ by Poppy Z Brite is a bittersweet tale of an act of self-sacrifice that goes wrong, and Nicholas Royle’s ’The Entity’ is an atmospheric story in which a frustrated writer’s house-sitting break is bedevilled by a mysterious presence. Lovers of body horror will enjoy the short, sharp grit and gore of Luigi Musolino’s post-Covid cautionary tale ‘The Plague’ and Paul Finch’s ‘Jack-o-Lant’, a confessional tale set in 1980s Liverpool. Tim Lebbon’s elegiac ‘Unmarked’ in a sorrowful, bittersweet tale of a restless spirit who hears the cries of the spirits of murder victims and communicates with an old man who can sense its presence. Not everything hits the spot, though – Tim Major’s ‘The Scarecrow Festival’ is a Wicker Man homage too far, a story too short to bring anything new to that particular genre classic.
All in all, it’s a rich, diverse and satisfying collection of yarns. Like most short story collections, though, it’s not one that needs to be devoured in order or in one sitting. Elemental Forces is an ideal book to take down from the shelf on a cold winter’s night in front of a roaring fire with the wind howling through the trees outside and maybe… just maybe… the hint of a strange, half-shadowed face at the window?
Elemental Forces is available now from Flame Tree Books.
