Horror! (Because you can never get enough)

MacKENZIE's Dragon's Nest

It is always a pleasure to spread the word about good books, doubly so when they are written by friends. Today I want to tell you about Dark Draughts, a collection of short stories by John Goodrich. (Crossroad Press, 2018)

For years, my appreciation of horror lay somewhere between the casual and the academic. Oh, I knew the classics well enough, but was not really familiar with much modern horror. Then I started reading John’s stories, of which Dark Draughts is an evocative debut collection.

Here are tales steeped in Lovecraftian mythos and ghoulish sojourns to the Old West, ancient Egypt, and the acrid battlefields of WWI. There’s even a piece of extreme grotesquery – “Champagne” – for good measure. [Note: I find “Champagne” funny as hell, but it is definitely not for the squeamish.]

Rendered in crisp, redolent prose, these 16 stories are chilling, witty, and unsettlingly modern. John delves…

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