When the Lights Go Out: 20 Horror Short Stories of Urban Darkness

Book Description

The city never truly sleeps. Neither does what lives in its dark. A man boards the last tube home. The train skips his stop — then every stop. A woman receives a voicemail from her own number, describing exactly what she is doing at that moment. A security guard reviews the CCTV footage and finds a figure standing in the camera blind spot — a figure that appears on only one monitor, never the other, and never during a patrol check. Then it turns toward the lens. When the Lights Go Out is a collection of twenty interconnected horror stories set in the shadows of a modern city — in the substations and the service corridors, the tower blocks and the underground passages, the emergency departments and the fire escapes and the multi-storey car parks of an urban landscape that has been building itself over its own history for centuries. Each story follows a different character whose ordinary life intersects, at exactly the wrong moment, with the darkness that the city has always contained and never announced. A nurse on the night shift discovers a patient no one else can see. An engineer at a remote substation hears knocking from inside a sealed transformer — and then hears it say his name. A boy on a housing estate makes a new friend nobody else can quite see. A journalist explores an abandoned shopping centre and counts the mannequins twice. These are not stories about monsters from another world. They are stories about the world you already live in — the commute, the late shift, the corridor at two in the morning — seen from the angle that most people spend their lives avoiding. The darkness in these pages is architectural. It has been here longer than you have. It knows the gaps in the camera coverage, the floors that don't appear on the building directory, the route the alarm takes when it empties a building every Wednesday at 2:17. It has been paying attention. It has been very patient. For fans of Susan Hill, M.R. James, Joe Hill, and the quiet, creeping dread of Shirley Jackson — twenty stories, one city, one darkness. Read with the lights on.