suptales.blogspot.com
I'm a bit late to this one as I completely forgot about it until I got a mailout mentioning #37 so I grabbed both and I'm very glad I did. 7 stories and a couple of reviews for a couple of quid makes this a very good investment of both time and money.
Opening the book is scriptwriter and novelist Paul Lewis who I had come across a few years back through his contribution to a pretty good Doctor Who book. His story here 'The Templar Cup' is a fairly old fashioned tale of familial obligations of the supernatural kind and the penalties for breaking with those obligations. As said it's quite old school and if you've read much Edwardian / Victorian supernatural fiction then you've read a story or three very much like this one but it's still an enjoyable take on the trope.
Tom Johnstone's 'The Chiromancer' is a gratifyingly frightful tale told over drinks in the great tradition of these things and concerns forgery, guilt, family and fortune. Again it has the feel of the classics about it and again that's no bad thing.
Distinctly less satisfying is 'Sacred Ground' by Nancy Cole Silverman which left me cold with it's ugly little tale of greed and retribution via the co-opting of Native American lore and it all feels a bit 80s horror movie level tacky.
'In The Rigging' by Jane Jakeman gives us a teeny tale of a teeny boat with a gruesome cargo before Gary Fry tidies things up with his fun new riff on the ghostly tale featuring a spectral butler in 'The Tidier'.
In the previous issue there was part one of Michael Chislett's ' The Subliminals' which I skipped at the time but having now read both parts it's an oddly underwritten piece. It feels like we've been dropped into a much longer and heavily edited piece that suddenly crashes to a deeply unsatisfying ending.
With the exception of a couple of reviews from the editor the book ends with a quick weird take from Malcolm Laughton in 'Long-Haired and Sickly Beautiful' that tells a story of an intersection between the ordinary and the extraordinary worlds.
Anthologies are almost always patchy affairs and this was so but happily very much weighted to the good and as such very recommended.
Supernatural Tales is available from the blog address at the top of this review.
