This one was pretty short, only ~180 pages, so it's no surprise that it only took me a little over a week to read through. Today's book is We Don't Hear Crickets Anymore, a collection of 6 short stories written by Kel Byron, author of the A Lonely Broadcast Series.
There's not too much to say about this book, since it's a bunch of short stories rather than a full length novel, however that's not to say it's bad. If you like Kel Byron's writing style in A Lonely Broadcast, you'll enjoy these short stories. They're full of the same delightfully decaying atmosphere as the rest of Byron's work.
As with A Lonely Broadcast, these stories are at their strongest with their settings and environments. Each story embodies a different kind of ambient decay of small, rural Midwestern towns, each one preying on a different kind of feeling - the liminal state of abandoned towns, the sense of fraying community, the decay of the familiar, and the nostalgia for a past that has long since overgrown.
The worst thing I can say about the book is that none of its stories were particularly memorable or stuck with me after reading. Not that they were bad, just that they didn't really leave much of a lasting impression. When I finished the book, I had to check the table of contents because I fully forgot one of the short stories.
If I had to rate the stories from worst to best, it would probably be something like this:
6. Saint Lily; not a bad story, but the monster is a bit too bland for my tastes, and I'm just not that big of a fan of stories with religious themes.
5. Trail Camera; this one meanders a bit but is able to tell a fairly compelling story with the hallmark gruesome descriptions that Byron is known for. Good monster too.
4. The Mist Over Superior; a fun story that meanders a bit too much for my liking. The meat of this one is at the end when the monster is fully revealed, which makes for a great, tense set piece.
3. Before the Last Stop; this one is the least horror of the six, but I don't think it's to its detriment. Its a story about nostalgia and the desire to escape the past, and it tells it in an interesting and honestly emotional way.
2. The Shoe Tree; if you like Byron's work for the visceral descriptions of violence at the hands of horrifying monsters, this one is for you. That's all I'll say about this one.
1. Wide Open Spaces; the strangest of the bunch but the one I found myself the most interested in. It's the only story that didn't feel as drenched in Midwestern rural decay as any other story, feeling more suburban in tone, but I don't think it's a detriment for this one. This is probably my favorite protagonist of the bunch, a character who is plagued by paranoia but still relatively reasonable. The ending is a bit vague and unclear, but that can be said for most of these.
Overall, I would rate We Don't Hear Crickets Anymore a solid 7/10, same rating as The King In Yellow (except I fully read through this one). It's good, but not too memorable. If you want a quick read with an intense dose of folk horror vibes, it's a good book to pick up.
Next up, I'm going sci-fi with There Is No Antimemetics Division. (Not) SCP-time, baby!
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