The Shivers is a collection of short stories by some of horror’s greatest contemporary writers: Joe Hill, Stephen Graham Jones, Grady Hendrix, Catriona Ward, and Owen King. It will become available on Amazon in ebook and audiobook formats on April 15, but I was granted early access by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

My review: I absolutely LOVED this collection. Each of these stories is unsettling on some level and truly did give me the shivers! I already know and love Joe Hill, SGJ, and Grady Hendrix, but I’d never read Catriona Ward or Owen King before, and I’m pleased to say that I really enjoyed them and want to seek out more of their work. Here are my brief thoughts on each story (brief because I don’t want to give too much away – I went into each of these stories blind, and I’m glad I did, so read ahead at your own discretion!)

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Jackknife is the first in the collection, and it’s a pretty good yarn. A guy finds a jackknife stuck in a tree, where it has obviously been used to carve some cryptic messages, and he decides to take it home. Little does he know, that jackknife was serving a pretty important purpose right where it was. This story is creepy and weird, and I had a good time with it.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

We’ve all been spoiled with the sheer amount of SGJ content lately! I wouldn’t consider The Indigo Room to be among his best work, but that just means it’s more on a level with what other writers can do rather than leagues ahead of them. (Sorry, super-fangirl talking!) In this story, weird lighting in an office meeting room gives a woman what she thinks is a hallucination involving two of her co-workers. Or was she actually seeing a glimpse of their futures? This doesn’t feel like a typical SGJ story, but it’s still creepy and bloody, and I enjoyed it.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This was definitely my favourite of the bunch. A typical American family heads off to their comfortable, decadent summer home in paradise, only to find that the perfect life sometimes requires a bit of a sacrifice. The Blanks is powerful, unsettling, and extremely timely in its allegory. It’s amazing what people can be willing to gaslight themselves about. This one will make you think.

⭐⭐⭐.5

My least favourite of the collection, but still a great short story. Night and Day in Misery follows a woman who is retracing the final hours of her dead husband and child. What she finds are answers to questions she didn’t know to ask. This one is haunting in more of a melancholy way than straight-up scary, but there are certainly some chilling moments. I really enjoyed Ward’s writing, but the story had much different vibes from the others, which does it a bit of a disservice by comparison.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

My second-favourite of the collection. In Letter Slot, a 15-year-old boy, whose father is dead and whose mother is working two jobs while extremely ill, sends an anonymous thought-experiment letter through the mail slot of an abandoned house. You can probably guess what happens next, but you’ll probably be surprised at where this story ends up going. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it until the very last paragraph, at which point I had to give it 5 stars. What a perfect way to end this unsettling collection of stories!

Overall, I give this collection 4 or maybe 4.5 stars. I highly recommend checking it out! It’ll be available on Kindle and Audible from April 15th, and you can either get the stories separately or together.