After Sundown by Nina Allan, Peter Atkins, Simon Clark, Brian Evenson, J. S. Breukelaar, Mark Gatiss, Alyssa C. Greene, Carly Holmes, Amanda Cecelia Lang, Eric LaRocca, Ronald Malfi, Helen Marshall, Reggie Oliver, H. V. Patterson, Sarah Read, Simon Strantzas, Stephen Volk, Ally Wilkes
Published by Flame Tree Publishing
Age Group: Adult
Format: Anthologies and Short Story Collections, Fiction
Genres and Categories: Ghosts, Supernatural
My Rating:
Published on: 10th October 2023
Pages: 304
Buy this Book! Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Blackwells / Bookshop.org US / Bookshop.org UK
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Darkness Beckons is the fourth volume in the non-themed horror series of entirely original stories, showcasing the very best short fiction that the genre has to offer, and edited by Mark Morris. This new anthology contains 20 original horror stories, 16 of which have been commissioned from some of the top names in the genre, and 4 of which have been selected from the 100s of stories sent to Flame Tree during a 2-week open submissions window. A terrifying cocktail of the familiar and the new, the established and the emerging.

This book was provided for free by NetGalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read this book!

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After Sundown Book Review

My first clue to this anthology being a let-down should have been that there’s not a synopsis given regarding the content. The synopsis attached to the book is more concerned with telling the reader how the anthology was created rather than what it contains. Before reading the anthology, I had overlooked that the synopsis describes After Sundown as a “non-themed horror” anthology. Horror is a vast genre with multiple sub-genres, which I’m inherently aware of, so I go into any horror anthology prepared to meet short stories on a variety of topics. That being so, the stories in After Sundown do not appear to have been collated using any sub-genres of horror that I am familiar with – and as an English Literature graduate, I feel confident enough to say that isn’t due to a failure on my part.

The problem is that the stories within the first half of the anthology are avant-garde. It isn’t that they’re “non-themed horror”, it’s that the idea of horror the author has chosen to portray in their story is so experimental that it simply doesn’t relate to anyone but the author. One particular story is focused on a man who donates blood and recounts the time the world’s overpopulation figure suddenly began to count down instead of up. There’s no twist, it is just pages of a man giving blood, remarking on the hundreds of people dying every day and the lack of blood donations. While this is all horrific, it isn’t a horror story and is also extremely distasteful during a pandemic. If the author wanted to use the genre to comment on the pandemic and/or blood donations in a time of crisis, they failed.

Other stories in the first 50% have the fatal flaw of bad pacing. They read like a chapter in a book, leading up to action which would finally reach its climax in the next chapter. The problem with the short story format is that there is no next chapter. One interesting story took forever to get to the point where the heroine realises she has the magical abilities to save the day, only for the story to abruptly end with her going to do just that. Did she manage to use her magic to save everyone? Who knows.

The second half of the book was much better. It wasn’t that these stories suddenly towed the traditional horror storyline; they were better paced, made sense, and chilled you to the bone. They felt as though they were written with the reader in mind (with the aim of terrifying the reader!), not just random ideas that were thrown onto a page, so they could say ‘Look ma, I got published!’. These were the stories that I expected when I picked up this book, and if this is going to be an annual publication, that is what the editor/s needs to focus on.

I never did work out why the anthology is called ‘After Sundown‘; even a non-themed anthology still has something that links the whole thing together.

Click here to view my other Horror Anthology reviews!

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