Some quick thoughts on a couple of Robert McCammon short stories...

So yesterday was rather shitty. Nothing major and certainly nothing that can be easily sorted but nevertheless, particularly soul-destroying to be caught in the middle of and have to work your way through. It happens and I'm really hoping that today will do me a favour and just be full of good stuff instead.

There wasn't a lot of time for reading by the time I made it home last night but luckily for me, I have a habit of leaving books lying around and forgetting they are there. Given the size of my flat (not particularly large, if you were wondering...) this is harder to do than you'd think but I somehow manage all the same and last night, I found a copy of Robert McCammon's 'Blue World' that I totally forgot was there. This was a timely find as 'Blue World' has some great short stories and I was in the mood for something familiar. It's also a great time of year to read great horror fiction so off I went...

From the battlefields of a Vietnam veteran's memory to an old-time movie hero's search for a serial killer, from Halloween in a special town--where the rules of trick-or-treat are written in blood--to a Texas road where a wrong turn leads to a nest of evil, horror master McCammon is at his terrifying best in this collection of stories.

'Yellowjacket Summer' is the opening tale in the collection and that's always the best place to start. Not only that but I have a real fear of wasps and hornets and I wanted something that was going to creep me out so 'Yellowjacket Summer' pretty much chose itself.

The beauty of this story is that if you're not too fussed about wasps or hornets, there's still plenty here that will scare. Don't get me wrong, the yellowjackets are enough by themselves (for me anyway) and there is a great moment where McCammon has a couple of hundred yellowjackets investigate a boy going to the toilet. He literally cannot move and it's a great exercise in tension as his situation slowly gets worse but he cannot stop doing what he came into the bathroom to do. I've read this story before and I had to remind myself to breathe.

It's not just the yellowjackets though. A theme that comes out in several of the stories, in this collection, is that if you scratch the surface of something relatively normal, what lies beneath can be terrifying. That is definitely the case here as McCammon takes the 'small town with a secret' trope and infuses with a venom (no pun intended... ok, just a little bit intended). We've all seen this trope before but I would be very surprised if you've seen it done quite so... angrily. Hornets are angry little bastards anyway but the character of Toby brings a real focus to that anger and adds even more fear to that theme of what happens beneath the surface. As the story progresses, McCammon lets us see just a little bit more each time and by the time the finale looms, you'd be hard pressed to recognise the town that Carla drove into at the start of the tale. The thing is though, it was like that the whole time... We just needed McCammon to show us.

I think what I like most of all though is how the story builds up to a crescendo and then... just stops. It's a brave writer who will do that and the end result is that you can't help but wonder if Carla and her children made it to safety. I hope they did...

I'm not one for reading short story collections in order so after finishing off 'Yellowjacket Summer', I went straight to 'He'll come knocking at your door', a tale of suburban bliss... and the price it carries. This tale is a lot less subtle as we're told very plainly what's happening, and what's coming, but sometimes a quick opening of the curtain is just as powerful as a slow one. That's the case here when everything is laid out for the reader, it serves as fresh impetus for the plot as Dan dashes home and waits for the inevitable. The inevitable may seem like a little bit of an anti-climax but again, it's all about impetus and getting everyone in place for a final scene that does it's job superbly and then dives into a brief burst of weird horror that serves to remind the reader that our normal everyday lives are lived out on the surface of something impossibly old and evil. You won't want to look too closely but you know it's there now...

You can probably guess my favourite story, of the two, but they're both a lot of fun (in that 'creep you the hell out' kind of way) and very much indicative of the general quality of the rest of the collection. Not every short story in 'Blue World' works for me but enough of them do. You can get 'Blue World' for the Kindle but good luck trying to find a physical copy (if my search was anything to go by), it's worth the hunt though. I might feature a few more of these stories over October, we'll see...