I picked this book up a few years ago from a harvest/craft/art festival as I was just starting to get into reading other local, indie authors. Many of the tales are set in Connecticut, which is pretty neat since I can readily picture the locals described.
Munson’s tales are reminiscent of old EC comics like Tales from the Crypt, or of anthology horror shows from the 70s, 80s and 90s like Tales from the Darkside, Night Gallery, Monsters, Dark Room and, well, Tales from the Crypt.
While Munson’s regular horror tales are alright, his skill really shows in his “undead plague” stories- Lovely Lea, Screamer, The Last Tower, Gaming, The Doomed Man and From the Bottom of Mirror Lake. By this point, our pop culture has been so saturated with fetid, wormy zombie-juices that we hardly even see them anymore. Yet Munson’s zombie tales add enough of a tweak on the trope to make them interesting.
At the end of the book, the author provides an appendix that explains the genesis of each story, an addition that I greatly appreciate. I love reading about the creative process that goes into a tale.
On to the stories themselves.
Blank White
A tale of severe writer’s block with a grisly ending straight out of those horror comics I mentioned.
Jackson and the Nothing
A man is chased through New Haven alleys by an angry cloud of darkness. But does the monster have a good reason for its anger?
Thunder
A simple tale about a cat being an even bigger asshole than normal.
It’s A Trap
I see what you did there...
This story is flash fiction only a paragraph long, so to say anything would give away the whole thing.
Bad Cop
A sadistic cop terrorizes a young couple pulled over on the side of the road. I’ll be honest, this story nearly soured me on the book. There’s a gratuitous rape scene at the end that seems designed only to shock- which feels like a cheap, unnecessary trick to me. It’s especially uncomfortable in the wake of all the police brutality scandals that have come to light in recent years (though, to be fair, this story was written in 2012, before police abuse became more widely discussed in American media.)
Luckily the subsequent stories brought my interest back.
Through the Window
A creepy, effective variant on the classic “the monster in the child’s closet is real” tale. I don’t think that’s really a spoiler since the very first line is “you told me there were no monsters”, which of course means that there clearly are.
Sarge
Young brothers Robbie and Zeke share a room with a forest of toys scattered on the floor between their beds. As the story opens, Robbie has begun hearing strange skittering sounds coming from the pile. You probably have an idea where the story is going- especially after seeing the little illustration at the start of the beginning- but it gets weird near the end in a good, creepy way.
Lovely Lea
Okay, technically this isn’t a “zombie apocalypse” tale. It IS a story about an apocalypse though. And a growing contagion.
Hanging with Jack
Another flash fiction story. Not much else to say here.
Bimini Underground
My favorite story. Kwami and Jada have swum through a tunnel in the coral reef that leads to a strange, air-filled cave. Why does it seem like the walls are moving? And why is the water starting to burn their skin as if it were acid?
Screamer
You don’t often get to see what the zombie transformation looks like from the perspective of the afflicted.
The Last Tower
Brandon and Rogers are the last two living people at an island prison overrun by the undead. They’re trapped in a guard tower trying to keep the hordes at bay. When their ammo finally runs out, they decide “fuck it”- they’re getting out any way they can.
In his accompanying notes, Munson says he sometimes uses this “fuck it” rule to advance his stories when they get stuck. What is this rule, exactly? To quote the author directly, it’s “nothing more than to have a character say ‘fuck it’ and do the opposite of what they were doing.”
Works for me.
Gaming
If you’ve ever walked through a casino, you’ve probably seen those people sitting at the slot machines dropping in coin after coin, looking almost dead. What if sometimes there’s more truth in that image than you realize?
The Doomed Man
Another flash story. This one with a zombie theme to go along with the others in the latter half of the anthology.
From the Bottom of Mirror Lake
The waters of Mirror Lake have been turned into a biohazard sludge by the big factory on the shore.
As Connie and her boyfriend Greg sit on the old pier under the No Trespassing sign, they can see the factory brazenly dumping crates of toxic filth into the lake. Weird, large crates longer than they are wide...
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