Incantations

Rating:
Summary: the new and original collection from Maynard & Sims
Review: With this third original collection - after Shadows At Midnight & Echoes Of Darkness - Maynard & Sims move into modern horror with a flourish. The stories here take the maturity of their writing - both in terms of style and content - to a new level of achievement.

Readers who recently caught up with this pair through The Secret Geography Of Nightmare & Selling Dark Miracles will be delighted with the stories here that range from a 22000 unpublished novella through to a 4000 word story that is amost slipstream in its execution.

As the blurb so accurately says -
Here is a new collection of diverse and intriguing supernatural stories that reveals the various arenas where good and evil do battle. Here is a new collection of stories that show the strength, depth and vision now emanating from this dual authorship.

This exciting new collection contains secrets unravelled in Wales; the view from a New York analysts couch; theatrical dangers; fantasy and legend from Suffolk; witchcraft in America; haunted houses; teenage unhappiness; sexual allure; pain's sweet taste; memories of prison life; an unwelcome holiday souvenir from Gibraltar; echoes of death in Austria; stolen moments in Devon; disaster from divorce; a haunting of memory and fantasy.

These are unpublished stories, including a new novella, as well as others drawn from well-regarded anthologies and magazines; Stoker recommended stories; and stories that are a wild roller coaster ride building and developing classical terrors in a modern manner.

Enter a world of witches and demons, creatures and beasts, but most horrifyingly of all are the people; real people with emotions, problems, and torments.

The authors of the two successful hardcover collections, Shadows At Midnight and the Stoker recommended Echoes Of Darkness, give us a book of supernatural horrors that linger long in the mind, that brings the shadowed terrors into the light.

If you think of these two writers simply in terms of traditional ghost stories - then think again - these are nightmares from a cracked modern landscape.

Buy it - paperback now and hardback in September