Book Review - At Home with the Horrors by Sammy Scott

Title: At Home with the Horrors
Author: Sammy Scott
Genre: Horror/ Short stories
Published: 2022
 
Description: Just when you thought it was safe to go home again…

In this chilling collection of short fiction, Sammy Scott dares to explore the horrors that lurk behind your front door. In “Katherine” a lonely woan finds an unlikely companion when she discovers that her new house is haunted. A couple’s mundane argument quickly evolves into a night of terror in “Wat We Have Here”. A harried wife finds herself the victim of her husband’s pranks when he launches a YouTube channel titled “Scared Mary”. An antisocial teenager encounters a mysterious world when he begins looking into the windows of his neighbors’ homes in “Peeping Tommy”. A mourning widow is forced to relive her husband’s death when he calls her daily on her cell phone in “Theresa”. In “People You May Know”, a happily married man turns his life upside-down when he send a Facebook friend request to an old college flame that no longer remembers him. A woman sets a trap for her runaway cat and is horrified to find that she has captures “Something Else Entirely”. And in the conluding novella “Emil Boens”, a librarian regrets the day she reads a mysterious little book left behind in the library’s drop box.
 
Exploring both the natural and the supernatural, the alien and the ghostly, the chilling and the horrific, these fourteen diversions first root themselves in the mundanity of everyday life before extending their branches into the very things and ideas that terrify us all. In “At Home with the Horrors”, Scott brings the nightmares to the one place where we should all feel the safest, and shows us that when it comes to horror, grief, loss and guilt can be just as terrifying as ghosts and goblins.

Review: When it comes to short story collections, horror is my preferred genre. In “At Home with the Horrors”, author Sammy Scott tells 14 short stories that are all set within the safety of people’s own houses. The one place you should always be safe in. Each story starts out as an everyday type of story, but all have twisty tales to tell. This is one of the best short horror story collections I have ever read.
 
I’m not going to write about every story individually, but I’m going to shine the light on a few that really stood out and were favorites.
 
The first story that I really found scary was “Sisters”. I don’t believe this is a story that most people love or have on their favorites list, but I really enjoyed it. We follow Andrea who becomes the caregiver of this elderly lady, whose dead sadistic sister seems to be haunting her. It had such a creepy twist and it gave me the chills.
 
“Peeping Tommy” was not so much scary, but it really creeped me out. And the fact that Tom is making a habit of looking inside other people’s homes is not even the disturbing part, gives you an idea.
 
The two opening stories, “What We Have Here” and “Theresa” were really perfect for setting the tone of the book. They really got me in the right mood.
 
My favorite story was “Something Else Entirely”. Amy and Eric’s cat Sybill escapes home. Eric has to travel for work and Amy stays home trying to find Sybill. We follow the story from the perspective of Eric, who stays in contact with his wife via text and phone messages. When Sybill finally has returned home, Amy feels something is off and Sybil is not the same. I had major “Pet Semetary” vibes and I loved this story.
 
Another amazing story was “Emil Bones”, which is the longest story in the book and actually a novella. Helena works in a library, where she finds a mysterious book with an eerie poem in it about someone called Emil Bones. After reading it, strange things start to happen in her home. This was without a doubt the scariest story in the book.
 
A few stories I rated 3,5 stars, but the rest was al 4 or higher. “At Home with the Horrors” is a very solid horror story collection, that I can recommend to anyone who loves reading shorts horror stories.
 
Rating: 4/ 5