The premise for this collection is interesting enough: Gather some of the most talented directors of horror films and have each write a horror short story. The trouble is, of course, that the craft of writing well changes across different media: and most of these directors have little clue what a short story looks like, let alone what makes one successful. 

This is not to say that everything here is bad, but the number of winners is far below what I might expect from an anthology, perhaps one in ten. Overall, though, I found far more pleasure in this book when I began treating everything as a pitch for a film: Yes, if this story was a movie, it could be really good. But its breadth and lack of detail or interiority really makes it out of scale for the short story to work. 

More than twice, we find sentences like "We follow the car and see Gwen through its windows. . . ." written as if our narrator is, instead, a camera. Or, "She crept quietly through the dark room and CLICK! CLICK! tried the light switch." So much for quiet, there, Mr. Onomatopoeia. 

Writers like Sarah Bolger and C. Robert Cargill are here, Owen Egerton and Lola Blanc (who offers a tale as topically taboo as it is psychologically horrifying)--these authors stand out for understanding the task handed them. For most of the rest, the stories are eminently forgettable, as written (but might make for a decent film some day, if expanded).

Dark Matter Ink and David Lawson, Jr. put this together, and I wish they had offered more guidance to their submitters (and more editorial support--much more). They built upon Cargill's Covid-era "porch beer talks" and expanded the reach. Great idea, good enough apparently to already offer a Volume II. But after almost 400 wearying pages of Volume I, I won't be reading it.