Member Reviews

I've been on a bit of a Darcy Coates reading streak recently, burning through her horror novels: my favourites so far are From Below and Hunted. I was attracted by the Say Cheese and Die! premise of Ghost Camera: two young women find a Polaroid camera that captures images of lurking ghosts, but also attracts their attention. The first thing to say is that this new edition is a reissue of the original novella 'Ghost Camera', but this only takes up about a quarter of the book: the rest of the book is made up of another novella, 'A Box of Tapes' (heavily inspired by The Ring/Ringu) and some short stories, which the blurb does not make very clear. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I'm not sure that Coates is as good at writing satisfying short fiction as she is at full-length horror. Some of these have brilliant premises ('Death Birds', for example, imagines a world where dark birds appear just before somebody is going to die, while 'The Run to Broken Ridge Lighthouse' is about a group of friends who deliberately trigger a deadly game of cat-and-mouse) but simply... stop after establishing their idea. Both novellas also fell a bit flat for me, although I preferred 'Ghost Camera' to 'A Box of Tapes', which was riddled with inconsistencies and poor character motivations. The stand-out is probably 'Unnamed Things', where a woman believes she is the sole survivor of a plane crash on a snowy, forested mountainside until she meets another mysterious survivor, Chloe, who tells her of the things that follow people in these woods. But even then, I'd have preferred an expanded version. This feels more like a scrapbook of good ideas for novels than a strong collection in its own right. 3.5 stars.

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