Having always been fascinated by the night and darkness The Outcast Hours was a no-brainer. We are all so used to reading books in which events take place in the light of day, but, here, each story takes place under the cover of darkness; it really is quite refreshing and makes this collection rather introspective in nature. There is a diverse range of contributors from all around the world, and some of the writers included are China Mieville, Will Hill and Francis Hardinge, but as with all anthologies, some tales are more compelling than others. However, all are well written and intriguing in their own way.

There are stories that are creepy, powerful, original and thought-provoking, and the fact that this is a cross-genre collection means that there is something here for everyone - fantasy. thrillers, horror, science fiction and contemporary, to name a few. The authors hail from all over the globe, and their shorts include diverse characters with LGBTQIA+ backgrounds, so if you are looking to challenge yourself to move out of your comfort zone and try to appreciate a multitude of genres and new authors this a great way to do so.

Many thanks to Solaris for an ARC.

The Outcast Hours brings together a large variety of contributors, most I haven’t heard of before. As a result we get an incredibly diverse range of tales. We have a couple based in America, but most of them are set in the Middle East or Europe.

Each tale encapsulates an aspect of the Night. Depending on the writer it could be a horror story, a tale of things that go bump in the night, a tale of redemption, even a tale of facing the ugly side of ourselves.
There are a lot of what I consider, strong stories in here. They grab your attention and pull you along for the ride. The good stories where so good, that I didn’t mind wading my way through a couple of not so good ones. There was only one story in there that I would give a 1 star.

One story that jumped out at me was It Was A Different Time by Will Hill, a scathing look at Hollywoods history and the way the old school men who are now having to answer for their actions, might see the #MeToo movement. The arrogance of John Barker reminds me so much of my Grandad. (I should add my Grandad isn’t that type of creep, just an asshole.) This story was written really well. It is relevent and invoked a rage in me. Damn I wanted to punch John Barker in the face.

Ambulance Service by Sami Shah was fucking brilliant. It was like a super cool version of Ghostbusters. The magic, the characters, I loved it all. This story more than any other has stuck with me until the end.

Outcast Hours has something for everyone. It includes stories by Frances Hardinge, Daniel Polansky (It was everything I was hoping for), Yukimi Ogawa, Lavie Tidhar and many more.
If you like anthologies, dark reads and trying new authors than this is definitely worth a look.

I received a copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Really enjoyed reading this. Some of the stories didn't do it for me but they had merit. I will list below my review of each.

The microstories throughout the book by China Mieville - 0/5 terrible

This Book Will Find You, Sam Beckbessinger, Lauren Beukes and Dale Halvorsen - 4/5 stars

It Was a Different Time, Will Hill - 2/5 stars - good setting but fizzled out

Ambulance Service, Sami Shah - 5/5 stars omg this was amazingly good

Blind Eye, Frances Hardinge - 2/5 stars meh

Sleep Walker, Silvia Moreno-Garcia - 2/5 good concept but lacking

Bag Man, Lavie Tidhar - 5/5 one of my faves so far

Gatsby, Maha Khan Phillips - 4/5 fun

Swipe Left, Daniel Polansky - 1/5

MiDNIghT MaRAuDERS, M. Suddain - 4/5 should be a longer story. Great

Everyone Knows That They’re Dead. Do You? Genevieve Valentine - 5/5 beautiful

The Collector, Sally Partridge - 5/5 lol

The Patron Saint of Night Puppers, Indrapramit Das - 4/5

Tilt, Karen Onojaife - 3/5

In the Blink of a Light, Amira Salah-Ahmed - 1/5

The Dental Gig, S. L. Grey - 1/5 Great concept, fizzled out

One Gram, Leah Moore - 1/5 didn't connect with me

This Place of Thorns, Marina Warner - 2/5

Not Just Ivy, Celeste Baker - 0/5 I have no idea what I just read

Dark Matters, Cecilia Ekbäck - 5/5 damn near perfect

Above the Light, Jesse Bullington - 4/5 very unsettling

Welcome to the Haunted House, Yukimi Ogawa - 5/5 !!!! So good

Rain, Streaming, Omar Robert Hamilton - 0/5 no idea what was going on here

Lock-In, William Boyle - 2/5 Betsy is horrid.

The Night Mountain, Jeffrey Alan Love - 4/5 nice atmosphere

A Partial Beginner’s Guide to The Lucy Temerlin Home for Broken Shapeshifters, Kuzhali Manickavel - 4/5 entertaining

All in all I think this collection has something for everyone. Give it a try.

A real dark and disturbing set of short stories.
I've only read the first couple and have decided to save the rest to savour at leisure.
I love collections like this as every story is so completely different. I'll definitely be recommending this one.

This is actually 3,5 stars, but let's just round it up to 4, because when this anthology is good, it's GOOD.

A common problem with anthologies, this also was uneven, and the sheer number of stories (24, I think) didn't help. I ended up having to consult the table of contents to remember the stories, apart from my two absolute favourites, "Ambulance Service" and "Above the Light". Especially the latter, it was absolutely brilliant.

2.5 Stars

The Outcast Hours is not my typical read. First, it falls on the darker side of things and then, it is an anthology. I generally don’t read a lot of those since usually they have a short story by one or two authors I know and the rest aren’t as important to me. But I thought I’d give this a try, based of the darker side of life premise.

There are twenty-five different stories in this, which just seems like a lot. What happened for me is the stories I’m interested in were too short and the ones I was not interested in were too long. Plus jumping from short story to short story was all a little disjointed. They all have a similar theme but some funny dark, others ewe dark and a few had a Tales from the Crypt vibe. I think you get what I’m saying.

The good thing about this anthology is every story is a single complete tale. There are some gems in here a few of my favorites were:

The Book Will Find You – Sam Beckbessinger, Lauren Beukes & Dale Halvorsen
It was a seriously creepy tale of a same sex relationship gone so many shades of wrong and the extremes one partner was willing to go to in order to bring back the person they lost. It was creepy, sad and utterly disturbing.

Blind Eye – Frances Hardinge
Think about a babysitter for criminals and this is her tale of one very special job she takes with a child that the caretakers warn her to never let fall asleep. It was a quick story steeped in the supernatural and I really liked it.

MiDNIghT MaRAuDERS – M. Suddain
Set in a different culture and time it is the story of a smaller town that has a new drug store pop up. It appears that the town is just not big enough for the two of them and they go to war with one another. It is a well-paced funny story with some great shenanigans in it. This is what happens when armatures try to break into places.

A Partial Beginner’s Guide to the Lucy Temerlin Home for Broken Shapeshifters – Kuzhail Manickavel
This is a funny list of things to do and not to do upon arrival to the Home. It is really short but just made me want to know more about this world. I would totally read a full-length book about someone just getting to this home and all of the challenges they would face in it. I was so sad that it was over just as it was beginning.

All the other stories for me were okay, some more memorable than others but each definitely dark. There aren’t many happy endings and there were some that you really wanted the main person to just die for being so awful a person. A few tried to have some sort of significance to the world today like using Tinder or the MeToo movement. But most kept it to move of a UF/fantasy realm.

The real question, is this for you? Well if you just want a few quick stories to read before bed and set aside perhaps to come back to every now and again, then probably yes. If you like ambiguous endings or ones that are not happy in nature, then again probably yes. But if what you are looking for is a real connection to characters and feeling ‘in’ the story then probably not. Like I said, these are short and there are so many it was really hard to feel attached. Only a few stories even stick in my mind a week after reading it.

I love reading anthologies. The outcast hours was perfect. I really liked the night theme. Stories were vivid, creepy and interesting. Definitely worth to read.

I really enjoyed this compilation of stories. While some weren't exactly my cup of tea, enough were well-written and plotted enough to keep me reading. I especially enjoyed the deliberate focus on non-Western/non-North American cultures and writers, and on speculative writing from unique points of view. Many of the ideas--a babysitter for especially difficult children and parents, a story you think will end in gore but has a radically hopepunk ending instead--are new to me and fun to read.

Oh anthologies. They are often hit or miss with me, sometimes I love all the stories and sometimes only some. But anthologies are wonderful reads for in-between other books.

This anthology has the theme of the night. Or, perhaps people who are generally at their best at night. I can certainly relate with that! I am one hundred and fifty thousand percent at my best at nighttime. So, of course, I couldn’t resist this one.

I’ll admit that I picked it up mostly for China Miéville’s name being on it, as I love his work. He has 9 ‘microstories’ in this one, that are sort of peppered throughout the book in between chapters. If I’m honest, these were more confusing than anything because with them being only a page or two long and with no real context or titles or anything, they seemed like remnants, almost. They were, however, very well written all the same, but I was still a little iffy on them… but I did find a whole bunch of stories in here that I ended up really liking!! I like how this anthology brings together a bunch of ideas from people of different cultures or backgrounds to tell stories on a similar topic.

Here’s a bit of a close up on some of my favorites!

This Book Will Find You by Sam Beckbessinger, Lauren Beukes, & Dale Halvorsen
This story is about a girl named Kara who finds a book on how to raise a dead lover just in time for having to actually raise a dead lover. It was from the point of view of Kara herself, which was an interesting way of seeing a ritual intended to raise the dead. I thought it was quite well written and interesting, and it took some really interesting and unexpected turns. I was engrossed from start to finish.

Ambulance Service by Sami Shah
The story of Nazeem, who is an ambulance driver in Karachi, and his apprentice Bilal. What made this story interesting is that the calls that they respond to make them more like exorcists than paramedics (though, really they’re something like both). Fantastically written and had me hooked from the very beginning.

Bag Man by Lavie Tidhar
The story of a man named Max in Tel Aviv who is a transporter. He is taking a briefcase from point A to point B when he is robbed of it by a group of thugs, which starts a pretty epic adventure of trying to get that briefcase back. A quick, exciting read!

Gatsby by Maha Khan Phillips
This one was a really enthralling story about a woman in Karachi named Ra who gets invited to a Gatsby themed party at the estate of a wealthy financier who is new in town. And some real shenanigans go down. This one was so hard to put down once it got going. Great stuff!

Swipe Left by Daniel Polansky
A story about a dude named Matt who goes on a Tinder date and it goes… pretty much like a first date goes… until it really, really doesn’t. A short and quite engaging read that had some twists that I wasn’t expecting.

The Patron Saint of Night Puppers by Indrapramit Das
This is the story of a chubby white Canadian gal named Kris who works the night shift at a doggy hotel. Now… as a chubby white Canadian gal named Kristen who in fact loves her some freakin’ puppos, you can imagine I found it rather easy to relate to the main character here… and you’d be right. :)

The Dental Gig by S. L. Grey
Frankie Bell has mouths to feed, and works very hard doing what she does, which is very careful extracting teeth from under the pillows of children. Yep, she’s a tooth fairy, and one who works for a rather strict company. This was a wonderfully unique story and I wished it was even longer!

Dark Matters by Cecilia Ekbäck
This is the story of an eight year old Swedish girl named Irma whose father dies an awful lot. Recently, Death has come to live with them, as has Resurrection, and Irma just seems to take it in stride. Interesting story with an interesting twist!

The Night Mountain by Jeffrey Alan Love
This is the story of a man who takes a journey with his wife and son up a mountain that lives in the night. They are urged to do so by his wife’s brother, a beast-faced man. The man telling the story isn’t that surprised about that part, given how he met his wife. This tale was one of magic and it left me curious for more, and yet satisfied with the end.

The Partial Beginner’s Guide to the Lucy Temerlin Home for Broken Shapeshifters by Kuzhali Manickhavel
This reads like exactly what it sounds like. Rule one: avoid corridors infested with thunderstorms. The thunderstorms aren’t there for research purposes, they’re there because we don’t know how to get rid of them. This was a neat story and it had me laughing more than once. This was my favorite story of the bunch!

All told, I really liked this one! More stories that I liked than didn’t like. Truth be told, I didn’t dislike any of them, though I found one or two of them to just not be for me, but that’s bound to be true of just about any anthology that there is.

Thanks to the authors, editors, and Solaris via NetGalley for the review copy! :)

The Outcast Hours is a curious collection of shorts, filled with strange nights and even stranger stories. You’ll find horror stories that start off in the mundane world and end on a surprisingly terrifying note. Fantasy stories that feel like a dream intermixed with stark reality. All of them are shrouded by the mysteries of the dark, by the late hours when strange things happen and no one sees. I found myself mesmerized by the mix of simple settings and characters who lead to complex, terrifying conclusions. At the end of the collection, you’ll be steeped in thought, wondering what’s waiting out there in the night.

A Couple of Favorites

The Night Mountain, by Jeffrey Alan Love

The Night Mountain is deeply profound, diving into a world filled with dark magical realism as a man attempts to stay with his wife and newborn son who are not what they seem. The narrative haunts in the best way, leaving full comprehension just out of reach. You’re left in a dream-like haze, confused by pictures of a strange pseudo-reality that reeks of magic, fairy tales, and horrors best kept in the night. It was mesmerizing, to say the least.

Sleep Walker, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Sleep Walker stands between mystery, horror, and fantasy, sending us to a show that is never explained. The story starts as a simple enough slice-of-life, following a girl and a man as she guides him to a show everyone knows about but nobody acknowledges. The final destination is terrifying in its simplicity. You’ll feel a slight unease begin to settle as you desperately want to see inside, to know the secrets hidden within the story.

I am a huge fan of short stories but I found in some the purpose was lacking. However one story really outdid the others and made the whole anthology worth so much more.

Blind eye was the best short story I have read in quite a long time and that's not easy for me to say as I am a fan of short stories.

All told the book while not the best it was good and because of the stories which were stronger it has raised my opinion of the entire book.

3.5 stars

Thank you Netgally, Rebellion Publishing and Solaris Books for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!
This is a story who are members of the "outcast hours", the hours under the moon, stars and neon lights. AKA the witching hour. The poets, authors, waiters, gamers, policeman, the lonely and the lovers.
The idea of the "outcasts" of society always intrigues me. There's something fascinating about the creative, the brilliant, the weird and I think this book mostly delivered on this.
It's a bit of a mixed bag. Some stories are amazing, some are pretty weak, but this is to be expected with an anthology. It has diverse characters and the writing is very good. Short stories aren't typically my thing, because I like to really connect to characters and short stories don't typically allow for this. This book I enjoyed a lot more than I expect to though. My favourite story was "A Partial Beginner's Guide to the Lucy Temerlin Home for Broken Shapeshifters". It was a lot of fun!
3.5/5. Some stories were 4.5 for me others 2. I'm giving it a 3.5 as an average based off of all the stories.
I recommend this to scifi fans and fans of short stories. If you only read one short story anthology this year, let it be this one!

How does one review a short story collection? Specifically, a large anthology with a wide selection of authors and styles, encompassing both speculative and mainstream fiction? I wasn't entirely sure, and had never tried to write such a review before (especially spoiler-free; what would one talk about when there is no over-arching plot?) but wanted to give it a go anyway.

I started out keeping notes on each piece, and making lists of my favorite stories, but about halfway through I put that list aside and decided to try and reflect on my thoughts in a more holistic way.


There is a lot of content in Outcast Hours, and I took longer than I usually do to read a novel of comparable word count. Part of that was down to Christmas rush and other deadlines, but partly I found that I enjoyed reading a few stories, taking a break, and then coming back for more. Some of the heavier stories required reflection, or sometimes the style of a particular piece didn't suit my mood, so I would instead return to the collection a few days later.

With an anthology of this size, it is likely that not every single story will appeal to every reader. However, every reader will certainly find something they enjoy, and the pieces are well-selected. The anthology creates a kind of mental mosaic of a thousand different humans in a thousand different situations, passing through the shadows of one long night. The experience reminded me of setting off into a vast metropolis, late at night, and encountering a dizzying array of characterful people. Some you like, some you love, a few you loathe--but all are interesting, and all have something important to say.

In short, Outcast Hours is a startling and visceral snapshot of humanity's darkest moments, captured from voices all across the globe. I very much enjoyed it, and found the collection intriguing.

As I was reading The Outcast Hours, I remembered why I don't like anthologies. The short stories are too short, and everything seems disjointed. The premise of night people and creepy shadows is intriguing, but this one is not for me.

This anthology takes the theme ‘people who are awake at night’ and collects a real variety of stories, most of which are horror-tinged. It’s a mixed bag, as many anthologies are, but there are a few gems in there…

The good: My favourite story was the first one in the collection – “This Book Will Find You” by Sam Beckbissinger, Lauren Beukes, and Dale Halvorsen. It was a great one to set the tone for the rest of the collection, combining an interesting voice with a slowly dawning horror at what the protagonist is actually doing. I also really enjoyed Frances Hardinge’s “Blind Eye”, about a babysitter who takes jobs for rather difficult clients, and ends up in over her head. Will Hill’s “It Was a Different Time” was a really compelling read which resonated strongly with me, since it focuses on a film director accused of inappropriate behaviour with women – deeply creepy and deeply relevant. For a breath of humour, I liked the peek into the Tooth Fairy business with “The Dental Gig” by SL Grey. It reminded me of some of the classic 70s sci-fi in those yellow-spined “best of year” collections.

The meh: I surprised myself by not particularly liking Marina Warner’s story, as normally I’m a big fan of hers – I just found it a little bit boring. Daniel Polansky’s “Swipe Left” was well-written, but entirely predictable. We’ve been pulling off that particular twist since the first minutes of Buffy. “The Night Mountain”, by Jeffrey Alan Love, seemed pulled directly from r/creepypasta – I’ve very much enjoyed scaring myself with the stories there about national parks which aren’t what they seem, and this could easily have been posted there. This isn’t exactly a criticism, as a lot of those stories have great writing, but it just felt a little samey. I really, really disliked the inclusion of China Mieville’s micro-fictions between the stories. I couldn’t work out if they were meant to be linked; very few of them seemed to have a point, and they just distracted from the other stories for me.

The rest of the anthology was pretty forgettable to me. None of the other stories held my attention once I’d finished them – but then, that’s not unusual for anthologies. There are gems to be found, but you have to dig for them. I never thought I’d say this, but I would have preferred a little more horror, to counteract the dreariness of some of the stories. So, overall, The Outcast Hours started strong, but failed to grip me. I’ll be looking for more of Will Hill and SL Grey’s work, though. I think three out of five stars is fair – you may well find you love some of the stories that didn’t grab me, or hate my favourites. You have to prepare for a mixed bag!

THE OUTCAST HOURS is an anthology of tales that happen at night, featuring monsters and death and things that lurk in the shadows. And while the premise and cover were enough to draw me in, I happened to forget my love-hate relationship with contemporary short stories.

Many of the stories in this anthology I did not enjoy, making for weak, non-compelling reading experiences. Either they were written with a narration style I found too crude and unfitting to the night motif to be effective, or the concepts were simply dull, poorly executed. I was forced to skim. Some others, such as "Dark Matters" and "Above the Light," however, were gems in the rough. A small handful of stories were eerie and well-written, gems among the plain, and boosted the work as a whole.

Overall, though, consistency was a problem, one which is inevitable when it comes to anthologies. Such is the nature of collaborative works. I look forward to the day an anthology that delivers arrives.

This was not what i wanted and hope it would be at all. The stories are very disjointed and vague to the point where the only thing they have in common is "night." I was hoping for exposure to new authors that I could begin to follow and look for work, but the first five stories were so bland that I have to put this down at the moment.

The Outcast Hours is the latest anthology by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin, following The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories from last year. I love stories set at night; a lack of action forces the characters to face their inner troubles, in turn making the story more introspective. That combined with me thoroughly enjoying Djinn a few months ago made this an instant request.

Anthologies, by design, have some similar theme or genre and The Outcast Hours is no different. As can be deduced from the title, it focuses on the night, on those who live and work and thrive in the midnight hours. It’s quite an open-ended theme (especially compared with Djinn’s relative rigidity of requiring a specific supernatural creature) and as a result features a vast array of genres – fantasy, horror, contemporary, slice of life, light science fiction – ranging from the darker aspects of humanity (portrayed both realistically and fantastically) to the hopeful. There are 26 stories, so I will just quickly highlight some that I particularly enjoyed.

This Book Will Find You – Sam Beckbessinger, Lauren Beukes & Dale Halvorsen
This story makes for an excellent start to the collection. It’s an intense, depressing reflection of woman’s recently ended relationship with a spooky framework pushing the story along. The reader follows a heavily self-loathing character trying to atone for the mistakes she made in said relationship and goes about it in a way that only gets more disturbing. Very creepy and entirely engrossing.

Blind Eye – Frances Hardinge
This one has a pretty original concept – it’s about a babysitter who watches children of some unsavoury types. She must take care of a little girl overnight and spooky things ensue. It’s hard to discuss it any further without delving into spoilers so just know that it’s a fast paced, exciting supernatural tale that covers more than expected with an emotional depth that’s often not seen in shorter stories.

Patron Saint of Night Puppers – Indrapramit Das
Despite the title, this was a great little tale – an anecdote almost. It sits firmly in the slice of life category following a night shift caretaker at a dog pound. In sharp contrast to almost every other story in the anthology it’s just another night taking care of dogs. Das sets up easy horror slam dunk tropes then happily subverts them repeatedly.

Tilt – Karen Onojaife
Follows a woman spending her nights at a casino trying to deal with an awful loss and given the option to fix it at a terrible price. I’m a sucker for impossible choices and Tilt delivers in spades with a simple but wonderfully executed premise. Short stories sometimes have a problem with endings, they can feel rushed or just stop arbitrarily. Mostly they end just fine but rarely are they particularly great. Onojaife leaves it on a great hook, revealing nothing but just enough all at once.

Welcome to the Haunted House – Yukimi Ogawa
What a weird story. In a good way of course, but just so odd. I’m not sure if it’s based on some folklore that I’m unaware of but wow it’s just so uniquely interesting. There’s this group of animated household objects à la Beauty and the Beast but they work in a haunted house scaring humans and can’t quite remember why or how they got there. That doesn’t really do it justice, look, read it and you’ll get me.

Lock In – William Boyle
Okay so I love The Catcher in the Rye so Lock In was an easy pick as a favourite. It’s another slice of life style book and is mildly reminiscent of Catcher in its latter half. Betsy is a young teenager who sneaks out of catholic school at night to wander the streets and find a cinema after being disillusioned with her authority figures. The story finishes fittingly but I would like an extension just to see what she gets up to for the rest of the night.

A Partial Beginner’s Guide to the Lucy Temerlin Home for Broken Shapeshifters – Kuzhail Manickavel
First of all, what a fantastic title; I love long, detailed titles like this. Secondly, if only one of these stories should be expanded, it must be this one. It’s a sort of epistolary novel that acts as a welcome guide for an orphanage that brings up a hundred questions despite being one of the shortest stories in the anthology. There’s so much potential here, I need more!

After reading The Djinn Falls in Love, I had an interesting chat with Shurin on /r/fantasy about how he and Murad grapple with their anthologies’ structures for ‘probably too long’ (his words not mine!) so I would be remiss to not quickly give some thoughts on it in this instance. Generally speaking, the stories were well organised. Each tale was very different to its predecessor with shifts in either genre, setting or tone almost every time. In fact, it was so well done that there were two adjacent stories that happened to stick out just by nature of being mildly similar. There were also interludes scattered in every few stories that were an interesting addition. They provided a nice breather every so often, but I don’t think they were really necessary. They were very short pieces of flash fiction that were unrelated and seemed more experimental than anything else.

Ask any book blogger and they’ll say the same thing: anthologies are hard to review. There will always be some great stories, some bad and a lot that fit somewhere in between. Ultimately, I read anthologies to force myself to explore new genres, discover new authors, and see how wildly people’s perspectives interpret a common theme. If the job of the editors is to accomplish these goals, The Outcast Hours is nothing short of a resounding success.

As you can see from this summary, the overarching theme of this collection could possibly be summarised as ‘nocturnal people doing nocturnal things’. I love night time so I thought I would definitely love this collection. I was also drawn in by the promise of a short story from one of my favourite authors, the impeccable Frances Hardinge.

The difficulty with reviewing short stories is that so often it’s quite a mixed bag and in this instance that was definitely the case. There were a few stories that I found wonderful and inspiring (Frances Hardinge’s was, unsurprisingly, one of these) but there were also quite a few that just didn’t work.

This is, for the most part, a case of ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ as a large number of these stories tend towards more horror or gore elements which aren’t really my thing. But there were some choices made that I would question. The first story in the collection is This Book Will Find You, a story written in first person from the perspective of someone trying to resurrect their dead girlfriend - an ordinary tale of everyday folk - but things get quite disturbing quite quickly. I don’t want to spoil it for people, because it’s quite an integral part of the story, but things get disturbing and uncomfortable very fast, and if it made me feel uncomfortable I can’t imagine what it would be like for readers who find such things triggering.

It isn’t that I wanted this book to be sunshine and rainbows (moonshine and rainbows?) but I did think that jumping in with that story set a tone for the book that wasn’t entirely true. Yes, there are a number of quite disturbing (and in some cases difficult) stories to read, but there are also a number that fell more into the ‘enchanting’ category - unsurprisingly those were the ones I enjoyed most. Were it me organising this collection, I might have eased the reader in with a more gentle story. As I say, that’s just my preference showing through.

I will praise the range of stories in this collection, no two feel the same, they have a range of different characters, voices and ideas involved. This isn’t the kind of collection where you get bored halfway through. I will also praise the diverse authors included in this collection - something Rebellion publishing are very good at.

If you enjoy the gorier, horror-fuelled short story then I think this would certainly be a collection you would enjoy. From an unbiased perspective I think this was very good, but from a personal perspective, this wasn’t for me!

My rating: 3/5 stars

I received a free digital advanced review copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

A collection of short stories perfect for those cold dark nights in winter, especially Halloween, The Outcast Hours brings together some incredible authors from many genres for something sci-fi.

There are some excellent stories in here, drawing from writers such as Frances Hardinge and Will Hill’s talents to share stories that are perfectly written. In particular stories such as ‘Blind Eye’ from Hardinge really were intriguing and I love the idea of a nanny for shady characters. In fact, I want that book to be honest.

I feel sometimes this book could have been shorter to be honest, with some stories not really impressing me, but of course anthologies are books where you find a gem not the whole item and it certainly has given me a list of new writers to look up and read more from. ‘Haunted’ and ‘This Place Of Thorns’ for me were a little off, however there’s so many stunning stories to make up for them.

A great anthology with atmospheric and thought provoking stories, this book is perfect for the scary season.