Pre-Approved for Haunting
And Other Stories
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A collection of weird, dark stories and millennial anxieties.
In this new collection, Patrick Barb explores themes of family found and lost, media consumption and the dangers of runaway nostalgia, the supernatural in our lives, and the impact of violence in both the long- and short-term.
A young couple's reunited with their lost son whose favorite fuzzy bear suit connects him to the ghost of a vengeful mama bear while he's alone in the forest.A jaded screenwriter can’t escape the haunted screenplay that’s ruined his career.A man returns to his small hometown, where the people are gone and the trees have taken over.A Slasher and Final Girl brother-sister duo match wits and blades against a sentient, dimension-hopping apocalypse at a never-ending summer camp.
From rural backwoods to Park Slope brownstones, Barb's characters face impossible, awful situations, testing their inner strength and understanding of reality. Covering quiet horror, weird fiction, supernatural horror, slasher horror, topical dark fiction, and more, these stories spotlight supposedly familiar terrors and fears in new and unexpected ways.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Barb (Gargantuana's Ghost) brings a hefty dose of the weird and uncanny to this collection of 18 intricate horror shorts, which sometimes bite off more than they can chew. The complex "And Our Next Guest...," for example, in which a successful but unpleasant actor finds himself in a green room slowly filling with sand, doesn't have time to fully realize its own ambitions. This story and others, including Barb's foray into military horror, "The Other Half of the Battle," about a group of teens playing in a junk yard as a war rages in the background, use drugs as an explanation for confusing and inexplicable happenings, which feels like a cop-out and undercuts the surreal scares. Far more successful are the tales that keep things simpler. The eponymous entry is a standout: a paranormal investigator discovers that a house is haunted not with the ghosts of the past but with the spirits of its future inhabitants—including the investigator himself. It's a bumpy ride, but the breadth of tone and subgenre that Barb attempts is admirable.
