‘This was always going to happen’ – Stephen Graham Jones (From ‘The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Twelve’, Edited by Ellen Datlow)


I’ll be honest, today was meant to be about my posting some quick thoughts on ‘Red Sonja’, another stop on my journey through ‘Sword and Sorcery’ movies. It clearly hasn’t happened though, has it? I tried watching it last night but I fell asleep twice and missed large chunks of it. From what I did see, I don’t think it was just a busy day that had me falling asleep at all the wrong moments… I don’t know for sure though, I’m going to give it another go tonight and see what happens.

Where does that leave things today though? Well, my copy of ‘The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Twelve’ turned up yesterday and seeing as I’ve got ‘The Only Good Indians’ on the TBR Pile, waiting to be read, I thought I’d give ‘This was always going to happen’ a read and see what Stephen Graham Jones is all about.

So I did and here I am, saying ‘what the hell…?’ but in a good way. If ‘This was always going to happen’ is anything to go by, I’m going to be in for a bit of a treat when I get to reading the rest of the book.

A mountain journey gets more than a little weird when a flat tyre leads a passing cyclist to lend a hand…

‘This was always going to happen’ is only four pages long but is a bit of a masterclass not only in short story telling but in telling a horror story too. Getting a flat tyre on a dangerous mountain road is bad enough; being faced with a cyclist, like the one we meet here, adds a really weird edge to the proceedings and that’s where the horror lies. Who is this guy and what is it with all the little offerings that don’t quite work? Graham Jones makes great use of not a lot of space to show us how a random encounter can grow, in someone’s mind, into something quite terrifying; just because the ‘hero’ of the piece has no idea what is happening. That tension grows really quickly and just when you think a revelation has to happen (or the ‘hero’ is just going to freak out, either of the two)… Well, I’m not going to give away the ending because it’s one that you need to read yourself. Lets just say that sometimes you won’t get the answers you’re looking for and that actually makes the horror in ‘This was always going to happen’ all the more real.

‘This was always going to happen’ is a neat little slice of horror that will take you minutes to read but will stay with you a lot longer after you finish. You can find it in ‘The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Twelve’ as well as the Denver Horror Collective’s ‘Terror at 5280’.

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