When he got back from questioning his mother, he booted up his laptop and opened the bloated file of his novel. It sagged there half-written in its window, the cursor blinking at him. Amanda. She was so murky to him that he couldn't even fictionalize her. His own words rode together as neat and hemmed as cars in traffic. Tuneless things. Dry as his mother's eyes. He'd been plugging square blocks into the round holes of his childhood.

These are not the kind of stories that you should just rush through to get to the spooky bits. Instead, this is a collection of short stories that feel incredibly deliberately structured, down to individual sentences and specific word choices at times, and it demands your active attention. I wouldn't say it was a challenging read so much as this is a book that is best enjoyed slowly.

There was no singular unifying theme throughout, but the latter half had several stories dealing with parenthood, which collectively give the impression of "damned if you do have kids, damned if you don't." Other stories simply had to deal with loss or how relationships change over time and I was left in a pretty sobered mood, almost bummed out after reading it. Not because of the quality - this is so damned good prose - but because of the content and the heavy themes that are tackled.

That is, except for "October Film Haunt," which was just straight-up scary for its own sake and I absolutely loved that entry. Also greatly appreciated the author's notes at the end of the book that detailed his thought process and what he was going for in each story; always a big fan of peeking behind the curtain and I wish more authors should do that.

Don't go into this expecting some quick and cheap horror you can mindlessly thumb through, but don't let my description of it scare you away either.