Kind of disappointing - none were AWFUL but there were no real stand outs and I felt that too many hit the "didn't explain enough", a few hit "showed too much" and a couple hit both.

I'm not exactly a discerning horror reader - I never watch horror films or shows and my fiction intake is like the SCP wiki, nosleep and a few books. So I don't think my issue is coming from being jaded about it. I was just surprised at how many seemed to end in a way that had no real connection to the rest of the story and totally ignored the suspense building that the author at done.

There's one story I don't think belonged here and I honestly found myself really disliking the concept. In "Sicko" the woman who's murdered in the first part of Psycho gets her ending rewritten... Except instead of being murdered she gets raped by her boss who says he'll keep doing it to her because otherwise he'll tell the police she stole money There's absolutely no supernatural element to this story and the Psycho connection is kind of gratuitous. It just felt super misogynistic and unpleasant reading someone partly retell one of the most famous scary films of all time just to describe going through something horrific in a different way. It felt outside the genre too.

Probably the best one here is Scream Queen by Nathan Ballingrud, about a fan of an old cult classic horror movie going to interview the reclusive actress who had a show stealing scene and discovering the sinister truth behind her performance. It was the one that felt most reflective and actually saying something interesting past just trying to be scary - about the way film stars can be an image more than a person, about the negative parts of film performance, loneliness because people want something that's not you... There's a lot going on as well as it being genuinely creepy and scary.

Other ones that I felt at least had some scary elements and weren't disappointing even if I wasn't sure they totally pulled it off

- Mine Seven doesn't fully pull through on the promise but horror set in ever dark Svalbard is great and the final reveal of the creature of sorts is genuinely creepy
- The Devil Will Be At The Door was genuinely scary even if it didn't feel particularly special. The feeling of inevitability was good where the ending is obvious from the start but it's still scary.
- Two Truths and a Lie was very much in the "tradition" of creepypasta stuff like Candle Cove and was mostly well executed. It suffered a little as usual from the story sort of demanding some kind of explanation but inevitably the explanation being inadequate, but the atmosphere and imagery was solid enough that it felt quite creepy and reasonably satisfying.

Others had scary moments and weren't bad exactly, just felt like they whiffed. For example, the last story here, The Whisper of Stars, has a bunch of stuff seeded in a story about a tundra expedition, such as weird writing on some trees, a paranoid expedition member, then in a very sudden ending everyone gets killed by wolves except the narrator overnight and then the narrator kills herself due to paradoxical undressing with hypothermia?, Just a total whiff of an ending. ( )

It’s a compilation…some are good, some are bad, some have potential but never reach it. Overall it was enjoyable, but a lot of the stories have an unfinished quality. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to make them “scarier” but that just frustrates me when it comes to something I’m reading. ( )

Really great collection - every story was strong. This year's batch was heavily weighted toward UK writers. ( )