Matt McAvoy Book Review

The opening stories in this volume of dark, melancholy shorts are rather brooding, and existentially bleak – the theme running through them is loss, death, separation, whatever you want to call it; however, by the closing tales the whole mood has changed.  I don’t want to spoil too much, but it is rather a pleasant surprise to find that Chris Kauzlarich dramatically diverts from doom and despair to hope and optimism.  I was awaiting that fifth act in which we have been lulled into false security, before it is torn cruelly away, so characteristic of modern horror, but to his credit Chris chooses instead to move us away from the fog in the darkness, toward sunrise on the horizon.  It is a superb thematic journey.

The stories themselves are pretty good, I have to say.  The author has a wonderfully macabre sense of suspense and horror, some of the tales merely metaphorical, others fantastical and vivid, varying from long to short, with one particularly notable offering providing the main body of work.  I always enjoy short stories, especially in the thriller/horror genres, and Menagerie in the Dark doesn’t disappoint.  It is packaged and presented a certain way, and the craftsmanship in the body of work lives up to its promised tone and hue perfectly.  Some of the tales are very dark and most are hugely enjoyable –those which stand out for me are a serial killing nurse and a man who relives his wife’s gruesome death over and over, causing her increased suffering on each occasion, but unable to stop himself.  If Richard Laymon wrote Black Mirror, it would probably look something like this.

But I don’t want to do Chris a disservice; he stands alone and, while I’m sure he has his fiction-writing influences, deserves not to be defined by comparisons.  I am in no doubt that the author will achieve some success with the stories, and he certainly should; it’s as good a short horror collection as I’ve read in a while.  I would like to have seen one absolute cracker of a flagship work among them, though I also know this is no small ask.  I would perhaps be very interested to read a feature-length offering from Chris, in a similar vein, and I do hope he has one in the works – if not, perhaps he can be persuaded?

If you like horror, and want to cosy up for twenty minutes at a time on a night-shift break, or a longer read indoors alone of a rainy night, this will undoubtedly have something for you.  With a modest yet eye-catching level of graphic horror, and nothing particularly offensive to speak of, I think it is a book with universal appeal, and a decent recommendation for a more vintage style and quality of horror writing.