After the People Lights Have Gone Off
Ratings17
Average rating3.5
Short story collections are always really difficult to review - the nature of stories is that you will inevitably connect with some more than others, and this was definitely true of this collection for me.
The highlights for me were:
Doc's story - an interesting take on what happens if one of horror's monsters (in this case lycanthrope) gets bitten by a tick which goes on to bite someone else... The lack of agency here adds to the terror. 5/5
Welcome to the Reptile House - A budding tattooist practicing on dead bodies in the morgue gets more than they bargained for! A fun twist on a Vampire trope. 5/5
The Black Sleeve of Destiny - Compulsive kleptomania from a possessed hoody 4/5
Solve for X - Effectively torture porn. Gruesome and horrific, but probably not for everyone 4/5
Quite a few of the other stories fell flat for me unfortunately though, but that is the advantage of a collection - there are plenty to pick and choose from!
stunning wonderfully creepy collection, there were maybe one or two stories that were majorly overshadowed by how fantastic some of the others were but all in all i had a lot of fun reading these
Yea! Creepy short stories! My jam. Some of these landed better with me than others, but it's been too damn long since I had something so delightfully creepy.
I don't generally seek out scary stories, but these were just the right balance of creepy for my tastes. There wasn't a lot of heart-pounding terror, but instead more of a general sense of unease – a slow realization that superstitions and the fears you never share aloud are there in the stories, insinuating themselves into the characters' lives. Part of what made the stories so fascinating to me was the familiarity of the characters' responses to realizing that their fears are justified.
I would highly recommend avoiding splitting any one story into multiple sittings. Stephen Graham Jones writes with a cadence that is as natural as a process of thoughts and the power of his endings draw heavily on the reader being in the mindset that has been built up over the previous pages. His stories flow best uninterrupted.
I received my copy of this book for free through the Goodreads First Reads program.