House With One Hundred Doors: And Other Dark Tales by Travis Brown

Velox Books, 2021

ISBN: 979-8596357288

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition ( Bookshop.org |  Amazon.com )

This is a collection of horror stories of uneven quality (some are actually just examples of “flash fiction”) featuring both some excellent material and some forgettable work.

The best tale in the volume is, by far,  “Something Walks Whistling”, a superb piece about a mysterious, dangerous whistler walking around at night in a nice, “lucky” neighborhood.

The title story (actually a novella), “House of One Hundred Doors”, starts out as a very engrossing, claustrophobic, angsty piece of fiction , a sort of vivid, collective nightmare. Unfortunately , in my opinion, the second part of the narrative makes it hard to maintain the necessary suspension of disbelief.

“The Mean Thing Which Lives in the Cellar” is an excellent story in which a disquieting, evil presence in the cellar affects the life of a whole family, while “The Graveyard Game” is a vivid tale of graphic horror taking place in a graveyard during Halloween night.

In the insightful, moving “Maria on the Moon”,  the son of a terminal cancer patient fights hard to keep death away from his mother.

The rest of the volume is mostly represented by fillers which do not deserve particular mention.

Brown is an author who, when he is good, is EXTREMELY good. Although this collection was uneven, I am already looking forward to his next book.

Contains: Occasional violence and gore

Reviewed by Mario Guslandi