House With One Hundred Doors by Travis Brown

The rest of Doc’s house, as much as I’d seen so far, was as odd as the man himself. The place wasn’t huge, but it rose above the rest of the houses on the street like a tiger over tall grass.

Our host, Doc, went through a lot of trouble recreating an authentic English drawing-room in what was, from the outside, a cookie-cutter American McMansion built too big for its neighborhood. There were five of us sitting in the large, plush room.

“Yeah,” said our host, “I had a hunch there would be some questions.” And if you open a door and the room on the other side has yellow walls, slam the fucking door shut. Bedrooms are okay if they’re empty, not so much if they’re occupied. Bathrooms and kitchens are usually safe, the attic is bad, the basement is worse.

But there are certain consistencies to watch out for as we go. I’ve never seen any rhyme or reason to it. Although this collection was uneven, I am already looking forward to his next book.“After the first door, the next room is always random. The rest of the volume is mostly represented by fillers which do not deserve particular mention.īrown is an author who, when he is good, is EXTREMELY good. In the insightful, moving “Maria on the Moon”, the son of a terminal cancer patient fights hard to keep death away from his mother. “The Mean Thing Which Lives in the Cellar” is an excellent story in which a disquieting, evil presence in the cellar affects the life of a whole family, while “The Graveyard Game” is a vivid tale of graphic horror taking place in a graveyard during Halloween night. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the second part of the narrative makes it hard to maintain the necessary suspension of disbelief. The title story (actually a novella), “House of One Hundred Doors”, starts out as a very engrossing, claustrophobic, angsty piece of fiction, a sort of vivid, collective nightmare. The best tale in the volume is, by far, “Something Walks Whistling”, a superb piece about a mysterious, dangerous whistler walking around at night in a nice, “lucky” neighborhood.

This is a collection of horror stories of uneven quality (some are actually just examples of “flash fiction”) featuring both some excellent material and some forgettable work. House With One Hundred Doors: And Other Dark Tales by Travis BrownĪvailable: Paperback, Kindle edition ( | )

House With One Hundred Doors by Travis Brown