***This article contains spoilers for (number) of the short stories in the book***
This anthology contains fourteen different horror stories. From zombie attacks to making deals with Death, these short stories will keep you on your toes and make you doubt if you are truly alone.
The Birds of Azalea Street is the first story in this collection. Leonard is one of the “strange” neighbors that some neighborhood girls have noticed a lot. He has strange hobbies, including taking pictures of them while they are walking down the street, and hanging up dozens of bird feeders, and he always seems to ask the girls the strangest questions he can think of. The adults don’t seem to notice his strange ways, and when the girls complain about the way he acts towards them, the parents brush it off and say he’s being friendly. Then one day, a strange girl walks out of Leonard’s car. The girls immediately assume she’s there by mistake and that she is in trouble or something, so they begin plotting how to rescue her. They first decide to try to communicate with the girl using a whiteboard, but the girl is unresponsive to their attempts at communicating with them. She does, however, throw what appears to be a bridal veil over the fence to the girl’s house. They freak out and begin planning even more feverishly than before. They eventually decide to ask Leonard for a cup of sugar in the morning. Long story short, they burst into the house, and find thousands of creepy photos that Leonard has taken of them, and Leonard ends up being stabbed to death by the mystery girl, who turns into a bird and vanishes without a trace. Overall, the story was okay, but it didn’t give me the creepy crawlies normally associated with the horror genre.
In the Forest Dark and Deep is the second short story in this collection. It was kind of like a March Hare x Alice fanfiction. This story contains two timelines, one where the main character is seven years old, and the other is her ten years later. In the first timeline, the main character decides to wander in the woods near her house. She finds a clearing with a bunch of chair-like logs set in a circle in the center of the clearing around a picnic table. She leaves and comes back a few days later to discover that the picnic table has a tablecloth, teacups, and an apron that looks quite like the one Alice wears in Alice in Wonderland. Turning around, she spots the March Hare’s ears peeking out from behind a bush. She runs away, making sure to leave the apron on the table so the March Hare doesn’t come after her. Over time, the girl and the March Hare become friends, and soon the girl’s birthday is coming up. Even though she knows the March Hare cannot visit her party, she leaves an invitation for him on the picnic table. Unfortunately, at the party, the girl gets bullied and made fun of by the children her mother made her invite. The March Hare witnesses all of this and decides to retaliate. The March Hare goes on a murder spree. A week later, the girl visits the secret picnic table and finds the bullies dead, fishing lines tied to their extremities, making them puppets.
In the second timeline, the girl is seventeen, and is on the secret picnic table, making out with a random guy. She spots the March Hare over the guy’s shoulder and panics. The March Hare is jealous and the next day the girl goes to visit the spot again because her friend is worried that his brother, the guy she was making out with, didn’t come home last night. The March Hare has gone too far this time. The girl finds the picnic table strewn with the bodies of her friend’s brother and his friends.
In both timelines, when the girl finds the bodies, she knows she must also look like one of the victims when they are eventually found. “Make it convincing,” are her words to the March Hare both times she finds the bodies. Overall, this story was really good. It was engaging, and I couldn’t put the book down while reading it. It did show some of the more psychological elements of the horror genre, which I loved. It definitely made me think twice about wandering around the woods.
The fifth story in this collection is Hide-and-Seek, which starts off with a girl, Annie, being stabbed and going to the in-between, the place between life and death. There, she meets a man called Crow Cullom, the right-hand man to Death himself. She knows the legends; she can play a game with Death and, if she wins, can continue living life. However, if she loses, Death will come to claim her soul. She chooses to play hide-and-seek, thinking that that’s her safest option. Cullom put a ring on her finger, which will take the wearers’ soul if they lose. And now, the game can begin. She has to survive until sundown the next day without being found and killed. She heads off right before the police arrive at her house, deciding that her friend’s house is the safest option. Once there, she shimmies in through a window, steals her friend’s clothes to clean up, and heads to the kitchen. Her friend finds her digging around under the sink and warns her to back up slowly. A snake is poised and ready to attack Annie, but her friend saves the day and kills it with a shovel. The police end up tracking Annie to her friend’s house, and while trying to arrest Annie, a tree crashes down on the cop, killing him. Annie is shocked by this and angrily yells at Crow Cullom, who just so happened to show up right as the cop died. Annie decides that her friend’s house isn’t safe anymore and doesn’t want her friend to die, so she rushes back to her house with barely a half hour to spare. There, she gets shot with a gun. She lost. But that doesn’t stop her from trying to make things right. Her killer needs to die too. She finds her father sleeping and decides to risk it all, chopping off the finger that holds Death’s ring, and placing it on her father’s hand as time runs out. This was one of my absolute favorite stories in this collection. Just the right amount of suspense and horror to keep me on my toes. The writing was amazing, and the story pulled me in right from the start.