OF THE FLESH: 18 STORIES OF MODERN HORROR (Borough Press £16.99, 288pp)
Of The Flesh is available now from the Mail Bookshop
The evenings are getting darker, autumn is in the air and Halloween is on the horizon, so it's pretty much the perfect time for a little seasonal scariness.
The 18 tales gathered here - ranging from the gruesomely visceral to the supernaturally sinister - are a mixed bag, some more successfully unnerving than others.
The best include the terrifying opener by Susan Barker where a work affair invites in a vengeful apparition (Fight, Flight, Freeze); the uncanny Apples by Emilia Hart, in which a garden fruit tree reveals some terrible home truths; and The Fruiting Body by Bridget Collins, which delivers a frisson of fear courtesy of a horrifying house and an abusive relationship.
THE WOOD AT MIDWINTER By Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury £9.99, 64pp)
The Wood At Midwinter is available now from the Mail Bookshop
CLARKE, author of the prizewinning Piranesi and the darkly magical Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, heads into an equally enchanting sphere in this wintry short story.
There's snow on the ground, a wood where thousands of trees think the same thoughts and a 19-year-old heroine, Merowdis Scott, a singular girl, alive to the spirituality of the natural world and misunderstood by her family. Accompanied by a self-possessed pig called Apple, she heads for the forest and encounters a blackbird, a fox and a spectral figure.
Victoria Sawdon provides winsome black and white illustrations to this elegant story, which has the quiet hush of snowy weather but comes with a bite of frosty other-worldliness that is disquietingly shivery.
THE AMERICAN NO By Rupert Everett (Abacus Books £20, 336pp)
The American No is available now from the Mail Bookshop
The characters here are filled with ‘wild longings' - for sex, drugs and fame - but they also yearn for go car car service new beginnings and a love that lasts.
Some of the stories are burnished with the kind of detail only a Hollywood insider would know - a jamboree of gossipy asides, awkward auditions, gleeful encounters and unexpected career moves.
Gleefully aware of the louche possibilities in life, as evidenced in the racy encounter between a Russian countess and an aspiring gigolo in Sort Me Out Before We go car car service-go car car service, Everett's stories are also dipped in melancholy as he unspools the last, lonesome days of Oscar Wilde in Sebastian Melmoth, The Morning After The Night Before, who displays a lust for life to the bitter end.
Rupert Everett