When this manuscript landed on my desk I was not expecting much. Another horror anthology, another collection of things that go bump in the night. I was wrong, and I was wrong in the best possible way.
The Forgotten Ones brings together five writers and what strikes you immediately is how different each voice is from the last. This is not a collection that blurs into itself. Every story has its own texture, its own brand of dread, and by the time you reach the final page you feel like you have been taken on a genuine journey. More than that, you feel like you have been in the hands of writers who actually understand what horror is for.
KD Davies opens with More Than You Bargained For and it is a quietly devastating piece of work. The story follows Jeanie, a chronically ill woman who receives a custom built car and finally feels like the world has given her something back. Davies writes about loneliness and the need to be seen with real tenderness, which makes what happens on that rainy country road all the more gutting. It is a remarkable opening. The bar it sets for everything that follows is almost unfair.
Deep Arya’s What Lurks Underneath is the most classically structured story in the collection, a gothic period piece set in a storm battered Oregon cemetery in 1920, and it is all the better for it. Arya clearly knows the genre inside out and uses that knowledge to build something that feels both familiar and genuinely surprising. The imagery in the final act is extraordinary, the kind you will find yourself thinking about days later.
Carl Bluey’s The Woman in the Softshell Raincoat is the shortest story here and possibly the most precise. It follows a criminal making a late night delivery with a kidnapped girl in his trunk, and a ghostly woman who tries to warn him off. Bluey wastes nothing. Every sentence is doing exactly what it needs to do and the ending lands like a cold hand on the back of the neck. In a collection full of confident writers, Bluey might be the most controlled.
Don Campbell’s Come and Get Us is the story that will stop you in your tracks. Built around one simple household rule, never call down the stairs, it is an almost unbearably tense piece of work. Campbell builds dread so patiently and so precisely that by the time the story ends you will be reading through your fingers. It is the kind of story that makes you want to seek out everything the writer has ever done, and then be quietly furious there is not more of it.
Hamo Woods closes with Beat of Blood, a werewolf story that more than earns its emotional punches. Following rock band Cruel Mercy through a disastrous winter recording session at a cursed manor, Woods takes the time to make you genuinely care about these characters before tearing them apart. The final stretch through the snowstorm is harrowing in the best possible sense. It is a closing story that sends you away shaken, which is exactly what a closing story should do.
The Forgotten Ones does not have a release date yet. That feels like the only bad news. On the strength of what is inside, this is not merely one to watch. It is one to clear your schedule for.
