Halloween Reviews: The Box Under the Bed by Eileen Albrizio

Here's a short entry for a short tome.

This is a book about being haunted. But these are not jumpscare phantoms or Creepypasta wraiths. Within this slim book, there are many ghosts of the more conventional sort- translucent shades of people passed from this world. But then again, maybe they are just conjurations of a brooding mind. For there is also a different strain of revenant here- formed from painful memories, regrets, mental illness- growing like phosphorescent gray fungi among the classic haunted-house wraiths. These other ghosts are the hollows formed by loved ones lost, and the dreads that lurk in the dark corner of every mind. This is horror in the vein of Poe.

The title is most appropriate, for the fears and memories are the kinds that are often shut up and locked away, pushed out of sight. Yet they continue to linger there quietly in the dark amid the cobwebs and dust piles, lying just below your sleeping head. Seeping up into your brain in the dead quiet at 3am.

The Box Under the Bed is primarily poetry, but there are a few prose tales sprinkled in the mix, including a section of flash horror stories that deliver quick little shocks of encounters with the undead. Like a lot of poetry, it merits reading a second time to fully absorb all the nuances and see the shapes etched out by the words like roots from a centuried oak in graveyard soil.

You can get a copy here.