Pre-Approved for Haunting: Collection Review
Howdy, dearest reader!
Weather is cooling, pumpkins are disintegrating into lattes, the season of spooks is coming. Make sure you get your prompts ready because October means the annual PLM Writing Challenge has arrived! For seven days leading up to Halloween, I write a terrifying tale each day based on your prompts! Make sure to follow me on social media or check in here to share your prompt with me when its time — it might get picked up and turned into a story! Can’t wait!
Now onto the spoiler-free review!
The Author
You might recognize this guy! (hint, I’ve reviewed his stuff before!)
Patrick Barb is an author of weird, dark, and spooky stories, hailing from the southern United States and currently living (and trying not to freeze to death) with his wife two kids, and a naughty (but lovable) puppy in Saint Paul, Minnesota. As a writer, his short fiction appears in The Dread Machine, Boneyard Soup Magazine, and Cosmic Horror Magazine, among other publications. His longer works include the novellas Gargantuana’s Ghost (Grey Matter Press), Turn (Alien Buddha Press), and The Nut House (serialized in Cosmic Horror Monthly), along with the novelette Helicopter Parenting in the Age of Drone Warfare (Spooky House Press). His debut dark fiction collection Pre-Approved for Haunting is due from Keylight Books/Turner Publishing on September 26, 2023. Barb is an Active Member of the Horror Writers Association and a Full Member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. — Barb’s bio from his website
Check him out on his website or Twitter!
The Collection
A collection of weird, dark stories and millennial anxieties.
In this new collection, Patrick Barb explores themes of family found and lost, media consumption and the dangers of runaway nostalgia, the supernatural in our lives, and the impact of violence in both the long- and short-term.
A young couple is reunited with their lost son whose favorite fuzzy bear suit connects him to the ghost of a vengeful mama bear while he's alone in the forest.
A jaded screenwriter can’t escape the haunted screenplay that’s ruined his career.
A man returns to his small hometown, where the people are gone and the trees have taken over.
A Slasher and Final Girl brother-sister duo match wits and blades against a sentient, dimension-hopping apocalypse at a never-ending summer camp.
From rural backwoods to Park Slope brownstones, Barb's characters face impossible, awful situations, testing their inner strength and understanding of reality. Covering quiet horror, weird fiction, supernatural horror, slasher horror, topical dark fiction, and more, these stories spotlight supposedly familiar terrors and fears in new and unexpected ways. — Amazon description
Releasing September 26, 2023 through Keylight Books, Pre-Approved For Haunting is Barb’s debut collection featuring 18 tales of horror and a foreword by Richard Thomas.
The table of contents includes:
Lost Boy Found In His Bear Suit
A Portrait Of The Artist As An Angry God (In Landscape)
Casual
Rose From The Ashes
Have You Seen My Missing Pet?
And Our Next Guest…
I Will Not Read Your Haunted Script
The Other Half Of The Battle
Pre-Approved For Haunting
The Crack In The Ceiling
Return To Voodoo Village
Putting Down Roots
Melvin And The Murder Crayon
There Is No Bunk #7
Iggy Crane And The Headless Horse Girl
The Decimations Of Corn-Silk Sally
Shattered
The Giallo Kid In The Cataclysm’s Campgrounds
The Review
Before I forget to mention, be sure to listen to the Dead Languages Podcast episode featuring Patrick Barb and the topic of collections! My cohost, Carson Winter, and I grill Barb on everything that went into creating this collection so be sure to check it out. It drops this Wednesday!
Onward to the review. Again, since this isn’t out until the 26th, I am keeping this review spoiler-free so get your pre-orders in for Pre-Approved For Haunting!
I absolutely loved this collection! Barb’s writing is always so clean and effective, his tales unique and chilling, I ended up reading this all in one day.
Here are my favourites:
“A Portrait Of The Artist As An Angry God (In Landscape)”: a young man feels overshadowed by his father’s career and does little acts of vandalism to assert himself — yet envy and anger have ways of twisting themselves into something wholly out of control.
“I Will Not Read Your Haunted Script”: a narrator explains why he’s tired of people sending him their supposed haunted scripts and how it ties to his own cursed past.
“Pre-Approved For Haunting”: a house not haunted and yet…
“There Is No Bunk #7”: classic campfire tale vibes about the nonexistent bunk #7.
“The Decimations of Corn-Silk Sally”: the birth of a ghoulish spectre, revenge, death, and all the right slasher vibes a la PBarb (this one was my number one favourite.)
In the end, I liked all the stories though the ones above were the standouts for me. Even the stories that weren’t my favs were enjoyable because of Barb’s skill in storytelling and prose.
It’s clear that Barb puts a lot of care in every tale, in the table of contents order, and themes throughout creating a delicious shivery read for the coming spooky season.
A lot of the stories deal with family, anxieties, and classic slasher tropes. Due to the care in TOC order, the stories lead into each other in a way that feels organic and artistic.
I would definitely recommend this collection for horror fans. Barb is an amazing storyteller and you won’t be disappointed in the stories you’ll find within Pre-Approved For Haunting.
10/10
x PLM
