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A review by aaronj21
The Dark Man, By Referral and Less Pleasant Tales by Chuck McKenzie
4.0
I love single author short story collections and books like this are the reason why.
“The Dark Man, By Referral and Less Pleasant Tales” is a delightfully dark, rollicking jaunt of horror and imagination. You can feel the author’s enthusiasm coming through in each tale. Collections like these allow writers to showcase both their range and their distinct style and verve and Chuck McKenzie does both very well here. What struck me most was the utterly unique nature of each story, every one was quite unlike anything I had read before and this coming from someone who reads horror collections like these fairly often. Underneath the horror and menace, and there is plenty of both, don’t you worry, there is a unifying undercurrent of macabre whimsy. I could tell from reading that this is an author with a lifelong love of horror media, he brings that passion along with a delightfully offbeat and surprising humor to his tales.
I enjoyed the whole book but some standouts for me were “Retail Therapy”, “The Shadow Over Bexley”, and the eponymous tale “The Dark Man, By Referral”. Reading these was like watching some of the better Twilight Zone episodes, effective storytelling, profound themes, and satisfying plot twists.
While the longer stories definitely allowed McKenzie to flex his writing talents, I also really enjoyed the very brief “flash fiction” interspersed throughout this collection. I’m a firm believer that stories should be only as long as they need to effectively tell the tale. Sometimes that gives you a 598 page brick and sometimes that gives you a few well crafted paragraphs. Extremely short fiction like this can be quite demanding but the author pulls it off several times in this collection. Of these juicy tidbits I particularly liked “Moth” and “Howler”.
This collection was an entertaining and refreshingly unique reading experience for me. I would read anything new from this author on the strength of these stories alone and I do hope he writes more, I need more of his distinctive style of humorous nightmares.
“The Dark Man, By Referral and Less Pleasant Tales” is a delightfully dark, rollicking jaunt of horror and imagination. You can feel the author’s enthusiasm coming through in each tale. Collections like these allow writers to showcase both their range and their distinct style and verve and Chuck McKenzie does both very well here. What struck me most was the utterly unique nature of each story, every one was quite unlike anything I had read before and this coming from someone who reads horror collections like these fairly often. Underneath the horror and menace, and there is plenty of both, don’t you worry, there is a unifying undercurrent of macabre whimsy. I could tell from reading that this is an author with a lifelong love of horror media, he brings that passion along with a delightfully offbeat and surprising humor to his tales.
I enjoyed the whole book but some standouts for me were “Retail Therapy”, “The Shadow Over Bexley”, and the eponymous tale “The Dark Man, By Referral”. Reading these was like watching some of the better Twilight Zone episodes, effective storytelling, profound themes, and satisfying plot twists.
While the longer stories definitely allowed McKenzie to flex his writing talents, I also really enjoyed the very brief “flash fiction” interspersed throughout this collection. I’m a firm believer that stories should be only as long as they need to effectively tell the tale. Sometimes that gives you a 598 page brick and sometimes that gives you a few well crafted paragraphs. Extremely short fiction like this can be quite demanding but the author pulls it off several times in this collection. Of these juicy tidbits I particularly liked “Moth” and “Howler”.
This collection was an entertaining and refreshingly unique reading experience for me. I would read anything new from this author on the strength of these stories alone and I do hope he writes more, I need more of his distinctive style of humorous nightmares.