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A review by octavia_cade
Quiet Houses by Simon Kurt Unsworth
dark
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
4.0
This is a collection of ghost stories, loosely connected by a framing investigator. All the stories are set in real places, or very close approximations thereof, and there's an awful, terrifying sort of melancholy about them. They're good short stories, they are, but when I think of this collection - and I started reading it a couple of years back and never quite finished, for reasons which are about to be apparent - there's one story in particular that I think of. The others, as I said, are good, but "Beyond St. Patrick's Chapel"...?
That story gives me the creeps. It really does. A couple of years back, and I was reading this book one night, and came across this story and noped out of it. Well, not exactly. I finished the story, shut the book with thoughts of possibly never sleeping again, and never picked it back up. Well I've read and re-read it all now, and that "Chapel" story is still horrific. It's not even about a chapel. A guy walks past the chapel, onto the nearby headland, and this invisible pack of something starts to silently track him through the grass. That's it. It's not complicated. It's not high concept. It's just plain terrifying.
What a fantastic story.
That story gives me the creeps. It really does. A couple of years back, and I was reading this book one night, and came across this story and noped out of it. Well, not exactly. I finished the story, shut the book with thoughts of possibly never sleeping again, and never picked it back up. Well I've read and re-read it all now, and that "Chapel" story is still horrific. It's not even about a chapel. A guy walks past the chapel, onto the nearby headland, and this invisible pack of something starts to silently track him through the grass. That's it. It's not complicated. It's not high concept. It's just plain terrifying.
What a fantastic story.