To tourists, Arabella is just another Irish seaside town, busy in summer, dead in winter. Those that live there know different, those that live there know...Arabella is different.
A place where the jangle of music can be heard echoing up and down dark streets at night from The Ice Cream Man.
Where every Halloween the undead rise to tell campfires tales.
Where a man decides to clean up the streets, doing so with a rusty hacksaw.
Author Jamie Stewart presents a collection of eight twisted tales including one bonus story. Welcome to Arabella, you may never leave, even if you want to.
Praise for Something Wicked, Something Dark.
From Laurel Hightower, author of Whisper in the Dark and Below
The perfect book for Halloween.
From Dave Musson, author of Tiny Tales of Horror Vol 1 and 2.
What I particularly love is how Jamie is not afraid to flex his nationality and make the majority of these dark tales be unashamedly from and in Northern Ireland. He owns the nuances and quirks of life in small British towns, and has morphed this into a nasty place of his creation called Arabella, somewhere I don’t ever want to find myself stranded. For all the gruesome, spooky things that happen in these tales, he still takes time to craft some elegant sentences and evocative phrases that help suck you in and makes the punches hit even harder.
A few of the stories here I have read before, but found great pleasure in returning to them; No Strings is deliciously creepy and unflinchingly brutal, The Craig Stevenson Club has a really clever premise, and is gruesome but leaves plenty to the imagination too - which is kind of worse - and the slow-burn tale of revenge that is Mr Nostalgia Becomes Mr Hollywood evoked Richard Bachman-era Stephen King.
As for the rest of the collection, there’s so much to enjoy. The Corpse Thief and The Ice Cream Man show that Jamie is a master of creepy dread and gruesome violence at the same time, while The Lodger manages to pack an incredible amount of world-building and backstory while still building tension, before releasing it all in a hugely satisfying way.
Livestream - the only non-Arabella story - was fun too and even has the potential to be something bigger, but my favourites were Fish and Chips and Vinyl Blues. The latter is a tale of a weird and terrifying 45 record that does a great job of leaving enough out to make your imagination step in and chill you even more, it feels like Skeleton Crew-era King and I loved it. As for Fish and Chips, it’s Jamie showing he can do something different and the ambiguity and intrigue of it has haunted me since I read it. I want to know what happened next!
