Ellen Datlow

We all love a good night at the cinema and The Cutting Room makes for perfect spooky October fare. The collection may not be perfect, but the most terrifying stories are well written masterpieces of horror. Using the backdrop of cinema as a theme, The Cutting Room says as much about terror as it does about our obsession with movies.

An experimental story by Peter Straub completely fails to do anything but here are a few words on the stories I absolutely enjoyed.

The Cutter - Edward Bryant
Shocking tale of a young boy who works in a classic silver screen cinema and the dark obsession of the cinema's owner/projectionist. Absolutely haunting. Perfect choice to set the mood for the rest of the stories.

The Hanging Man of Oz
Well written, creepy story of about the Hanging Munchkin urban legend. The writing is great but the dialogue is terrible.

Cuts - F. Paul Wilson
No words, just read this...READ IT!

Final girl theory - A.C. Wise
An obsessed fan meets the star of an odd and disturbing cult film. An amazing look at the dissolution of nostalgia when confronted with the reality of consequence.

The Thousand Cuts - Ian Watson
When time jumps forward randomly a group of people begin to suspect that their reality is merely a bunch of edits in a movie. My favourite of the bunch. Hilarious and brilliantly bleak.

Dead Image - David Morrell
Writer worms his way into the role of film director by casting an actor who resembles a classic actor long dead. I liked this one a lot. More of a thinky thriller story.

each thing I show you is a piece of my death - Gemma Files & Stephen J. Barringer
Really experimental piece. Clearly inspired by slender man and snuff films. Perhaps the darkest and goriest of the stories. written as emails and computer correspondence.

Cinder Images - Gary McMahon
Disturbing story of Holocaust and Succubus exposing us to the horror of violence. Very supernatural. Well written and scary.

The Pied Piper of Hammersmith - Nicholas Royle
Watching trains go by is like watching a filmstrip for a young man. The title of this is brilliant as well as the story within.

Recreation - Lucy A. Snyder
A poem. Love letter to film in the days of cold digital production.

Even the Pawn - Joel Lane
Murder mystery. Body in a dumpster. Really nice twist ending. And I mean cool twist ending.

The cinema is a medium of light, but it’s astounding the darkness that rises from the shadows. Whether behind the scenes or sitting in the seats this book will take you through the screen in a way rarely experienced in written fiction.… (mere)

Take that 3 as a positive 3. I very much enjoyed my time with this book! It's just as is usually the case with anthologies I found my opinions varied a lot between stories and there weren't any huge standouts either. But there's definitely quite a few high quality stories here.

Thinking of faves:
- Caker's Man: Great creepy story about the very real creepiness of certain adults as experienced by kids, yet done without depicting any truly awful acts. The horror of being overfamiliar, leering, suggesting gross things. The possibly supernatural element springs from that, and it's vague and uncertain but works well due to being grounded in relatable horror.
- Dancing Sober in the Dust: The creepy narrator recovers the costumes of a grim dancing duo, with the sections of the story interspersed with museum catalogue style descriptions of the costumes. The ending almost feels a touch cliche but the whole thing really works, with the extra theme of the past as living memory vs the past as stuck in archives.
- The God Bag: this is how you pull off a "twist" ending when the reveal seems inevitable. Heavy on the theme of dementia and aging and what you lose and what you'd give to get yourself back. It's not clear if the mother's sacrifice is something she'd have done in her right mind - maybe it was just the first thing that came to mind while barely conscious - but it doesn't really matter. It's really chilling and effective, again grounded in very relatable horror around parenthood and loss of self.
- The Quizmasters: A shorter one based on a kind of goofy concept that's pulled off effectively and doesn't outstay its welcome. The horror of random chance and "why would someone do that"
- The Steering Wheel Club: Powerfully hones in on the emotions and drives of abusive men. The ending really boils it down to something incredibly effective - getting what you want forever as horrifying punishment
- Shards: Friends go to a cabin and it destroys their lives. A cursed object type story, but written really well.
- Chit Chit: There's a really effectively creepy scene of someone having their skull "massaged" so it's soft and can be transformed into a horse skull but I admit my appreciation of this one is mostly due to featuring a folk horror favourite tradition Mari Lwyd
- Tiptoe: A Laird Barron story that taps into what seems to be his usual discomfort with parenting and the horrors that emerge from heterosexual relationships. Nearly nothing horrific actually happens in view, so it's mostly just a constant unease, realising there are people who are not like you that you pass every day and they're dangerous. With an excellent closing image.

A few of the others were pretty decent but didn't make an impact on me, most of the rest weren't *bad* bad but felt like they didn't work totally or just weren't right for my tastes.

The Offering: I think this wasn't bad exactly - although the conclusion could have been chopped off - but I just couldn't help feeling these were the absolute worst AirBnB hosts of all time. It actually bugged me a lot how irresponsible they were! This would be fine but the conclusion talks about the aftermath and doesn't address it. Weirdly weakens the story for me.
Poor Butcher-Bird: This had some good stuff (and the most effective and consistent use of gore and descriptions of horror imagery) but I just really really hate stories where it's about a supernatural creature and her human lover and we're supposed to be like, cheering the supernatural creature eating humans or w/e because the creature is really cool and morally right. I mean... yeah, obviously, in the story it's fine for her to do it. idk just a daft pet peeve
The King of Stones: Just a bit of a mess.

… (mere)

Obviously short story collections are very variable but overall I enjoyed this a lot. There's none I'd super recommend but there were no real clunkers either (although the first story is overall the worst I think)

Some that I liked more than average:

In a Cavern, In a Canyon by Laird Barron - combined a well sketched out background of Alaskan outposts and rough family life with a particularly vivid and uncomfortable monster the help me monster, a creature who appears when people are trying to help others and eats them due to their compassion the monster and the way a disappearance or a single experience can define your life connected well too

Between the Pilings by Steve Rasnic Tem - looking at lovecraftian innsmouth as a smalltime seaside resort. I think *just* the seaside town aspect was enough to make me like it because it reminded me of all the run down seaside towns in the UK but things like the froggy people being hotel clerks tapping on their computer was charming too. And the sense of chasing nostalgia and the past and then sometimes it creeps up and catches you... It's good

The Underground Economy by John Langan - I'm not sure why this stuck with me; it's set mostly in a strip club and there's no attempt at explanation or connections. It just... Is. But for some reason the imagery really compelled me. Hard one to convey

The Rooms Are High by Reggie Oliver - another one where I probably enjoyed it more because it's clearly set in a seaside town I know well (Ramsgate) but I just loved the atmosphere here. It kind of whiffs the ending I think but it really sells the sense of things being slightly off and I love the old style b&b setting. Be warned for descriptions of implied child and adult sexual abuse though. The way it played with memory and age and going back to something actually bad... There's a decent amount left unanswered that I feel wasn't really used well but the parts that are there are very good

Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma - this constantly came close to being gratuitously unpleasant but never crossed it. Again heavy warnings for incest, sexual abuse, murder, child sexual abuse there's something slightly absurd about the ending but in a way that's like "fuck it why not, they deserve it". Again it's largely about how your past can destroy your present and escaping that and the consequences of it.

I also liked the Tamsyn Muir entry The Woman in the Hill. The Neil Gaiman entry Black Dog had promise but got a bit screwed by its connection to American Gods which ruined some of the horror. the rest are all at least alright and all very readable.… (mere)

Kind of disappointing - none were AWFUL but there were no real stand outs and I felt that too many hit the "didn't explain enough", a few hit "showed too much" and a couple hit both.

I'm not exactly a discerning horror reader - I never watch horror films or shows and my fiction intake is like the SCP wiki, nosleep and a few books. So I don't think my issue is coming from being jaded about it. I was just surprised at how many seemed to end in a way that had no real connection to the rest of the story and totally ignored the suspense building that the author at done.

There's one story I don't think belonged here and I honestly found myself really disliking the concept. In "Sicko" the woman who's murdered in the first part of Psycho gets her ending rewritten... Except instead of being murdered she gets raped by her boss who says he'll keep doing it to her because otherwise he'll tell the police she stole money There's absolutely no supernatural element to this story and the Psycho connection is kind of gratuitous. It just felt super misogynistic and unpleasant reading someone partly retell one of the most famous scary films of all time just to describe going through something horrific in a different way. It felt outside the genre too.

Probably the best one here is Scream Queen by Nathan Ballingrud, about a fan of an old cult classic horror movie going to interview the reclusive actress who had a show stealing scene and discovering the sinister truth behind her performance. It was the one that felt most reflective and actually saying something interesting past just trying to be scary - about the way film stars can be an image more than a person, about the negative parts of film performance, loneliness because people want something that's not you... There's a lot going on as well as it being genuinely creepy and scary.

Other ones that I felt at least had some scary elements and weren't disappointing even if I wasn't sure they totally pulled it off

- Mine Seven doesn't fully pull through on the promise but horror set in ever dark Svalbard is great and the final reveal of the creature of sorts is genuinely creepy
- The Devil Will Be At The Door was genuinely scary even if it didn't feel particularly special. The feeling of inevitability was good where the ending is obvious from the start but it's still scary.
- Two Truths and a Lie was very much in the "tradition" of creepypasta stuff like Candle Cove and was mostly well executed. It suffered a little as usual from the story sort of demanding some kind of explanation but inevitably the explanation being inadequate, but the atmosphere and imagery was solid enough that it felt quite creepy and reasonably satisfying.

Others had scary moments and weren't bad exactly, just felt like they whiffed. For example, the last story here, The Whisper of Stars, has a bunch of stuff seeded in a story about a tundra expedition, such as weird writing on some trees, a paranoid expedition member, then in a very sudden ending everyone gets killed by wolves except the narrator overnight and then the narrator kills herself due to paradoxical undressing with hypothermia?, Just a total whiff of an ending.… (mere)