‘We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone’ – Robert Malfi (Titan Books)

 

Page Count: 355 Pages

Is it now a ‘Monday Tradition’ to apologise for the ‘blogging silence’ of the last couple of days? Well, lets leave it another couple of weeks, and we’ll see, but it’s starting to look that way isn’t it…? ;o) I’d just about run out of energy by Friday and needed a couple of days to recharge. So that’s exactly what this Graeme did and I don’t regret a second of it. I spent most of the time re-watching seasons of ‘Slasher’ but I did get a little reading under my belt as well, of course I did :o)

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Ronald Malfi’s two novella collections and I was in the mood for some short stories ove the weekend. ‘We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone’ felt like an opportunity to have the ‘best of both worlds’ and…

Twenty haunting stories from the Bram Stoker Award nominated, and bestselling author of Come With Me.

A man leaves rehab and tries to make a new life for himself, only to find the past closing in on him. A married couple on holiday have a bizarre encounter with a shiver of sharks. And, on Halloween night, a young boy learns the truth of the world from the strange and unsettling Mr Trueheart.

From London to Baltimore and many places in between, these stories claw through reality to find the horror deep within.

In Ronald Malfi’s debut short story collection, the shadows in the dark are ever moving, ever hungry, and the darkness that lurks beneath the surface is never too far away…

Normally, I’d tackle one of these posts with a little bit to say about each story but there are twenty here, and today is shaping up to be a busy one, so I’m just going to talk about my impressions of the collection as a whole. Hope that’s ok ;o)

You know me, and my thoughts about short story collections, not every story is going to land with every reader but on average, there’s something for everyone to enjoy. And that is definitely the case here with ‘We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone’; a collection that is consistently good throughout, it was very easy to go with the ‘just one more story’ approach.

In each story, Malfi demonstrates that he has a really keen eye for a concept to intrigue (and hook) the reader as well as the ability to deliver on that early promise. There were definitely tales where I finished reading and was left a little bit stunned by the way they closed. The kind of stories where an hour, or so later, you still find yourself thinking ‘damn, that happened…’ And it really did happen… In tales like ‘Dinner Party’, ‘Learned Children’ and ‘Knocking’ in particular, Malfi stays true to his concept and isn’t afraid to follow it through to the inevitable conclusion. And it’s always well worth the price of entry. Actually, I’ll add ‘The House on Cottage Lane’ to that list; just when you think it will leave you with a terrible question unanswered, you’re left almost wishing that it had.

Anyway...

There is a lot to like in this collection but I would temper it, just a little, with the caveat that the connotations you associate with the word ‘haunting’ will ultimately determine how much you get out of the book as a whole.

Throughout ‘We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone’, Malfi plays with our expectations around what ‘haunting’ can mean. I’ll be honest, I came for the supernatural/horror connotations, and had these in fine style, but learnt that ‘haunting’ can just as easily be the imagery of ‘Chupacabra’ and ‘Painstation’, the sudden violence of ‘The Jumping Sharks of Dyer Island’ or even how a pseudonym can turn a writer into the ghost that haunts their own work (I’m looking at you ‘Underneath’, you had me wondering whether or not ‘Ronald Malfi’ is a pseudonym…)

I came for the supernatural horror and so it was no surprise that those tales hit the hardest; I mean, they all did but those tales are the ones that will continue to nibble away at me. The others? They all hit the target, maybe just not as hard. That’s the beauty of it though, like I said, something for everyone.

Ronald Malfi’s work just goes from strength to strength then (at least, what I’ve read) and the next step is to check out one of his novels. Any recommendations…?