Six Scary Stories

I love short horror. I love finding new horror writers. I loved finding a book curated by King. I did not love this book. Oh, I certainly wanted to. Nothing here was very frightening. A few things were not very well-developed or very original. The first story is a standard, if underdeveloped, tourist tale, the type of which one can find plenty on Netflix–and they are generally not that good. It's epistolary motif only half-worked. I wanted more from this story. The second story just isn't very good. If one wishes to read the troubled-child-possessed-teddy type of story, Tad Williams's ‘The Writer's Child' is far superior. ‘The Spots' is a slight step up, in an absurdist, almost-sorta-fable way, and the Leader make me a bit twitchy, honestly...‘The Unpicking' I found superior to the other stories. It had the best writing, the most interesting characterizations, it was original, and it was fucked up. I actually quite liked this story. Mr Button had the surest language of everyone. The last two were fair but underwhelming and a decent trifle, respectively, but not very well developed.

So, whilst I'm glad to have read this book in basically an hour or so, I'm mostly unimpressed by the stories, with the one exception. Surely, these couldn't have been the best of the lot? Also, for a writing contest, most of these people were already established somehow, so I was a little disappointed because I had assumed they were all bright, shiny new blood. Ah, well. The world needs more disturbing tales of toys.