SonnenbarkeThe anthology Found (“Eighteen stories of found footage horror”) by Andrew Cull and Gabino Iglesias came recommended by several horror aficionados, and I approached it with high hopes. I’m a fan of films in the same vein (my favourite is Lake Mungo) and existing fiction by the likes of Gemma Files (the novel Experimental Film and several stories) and Terry Dowling (“Cheat Light” is just one of the many jewels in his fantastic Basic Black collection). But does this new round of tales from the post-copypasta era measure up?
You can’t deny the editors are committed to the bit. The book is designed to look like an old videocassette box, and the first few pages are full of dire warnings not to go any further. Iglesias’ introduction is pretty standard but Cull goes right off the deep end, cobbling together a Thin-Man style yarn about family homicide and cattle mutilation which pretends to be real, fapping about the murderer while overlooking the victims in the highest True Crime style.
By this point the gag was wearing thin, and Holly Rae Garcia’s opening story “Two Months Too Long” didn’t come a moment too soon. It’s a great piece of bad taste horror that will make you laugh while also feeling slightly unwell. The next few stories struggle to live up to this flying start, and “The Veiled Lady” by Angela Sylvaine, though good, is more about diary entries (it’s not the only tale in the book to be about writing rather than film). But there are a few great stories which are also bang on theme.
“Ghost Town Adventures” by Joe Butler is probably the closest to the classic found footage narrative, and its opening pages are for my money the scariest thing in the collection, though there’s stiff competition from “Walls and Floors and Bricks and Stone” by Georgia Cook, a highly unsettling look at the bond between families and the buildings they inhabit. Tim McGregor’s “Green Magnetic Tape” explores jealousy and old secrets within an uneasy couple in a way that is affecting as well as sinister.
“Grave Issue” by Bev Vincent is another of the writing-based stories, with a contagion narrative inspired by Ramsey Campbell, Borges and maybe later writers like Mark Samuels. Not amazingly original but still effective. And “This Video Is Unavailable” by Robert Levy is a bracing take on Youtube/Tiktok influencer culture; Levy loses the realistic voice of some of his characters at the end, which is a shame, because this kind of fiction usually stands or falls on the author's ability to hide their own hand. But it’s still a memorable story. Overall I would’ve liked to see more explorations of very recent video phenomena, but maybe that was foolish given the nostalgia-crazed cover!
So yeah, though there is a certain amount of filler here, and some of the stories felt pretty well-worn in terms of plot, if you like the collection’s theme and fragmented, multi-perspective narratives in general then I do recommend Found.
https://www.abebooks.com/9780648731535/Found-Anthology-Footage-Horror-Stories-0648731537/plp
#HollyRaeGarcia #JoeButler #TimMcgregor #GeorgiaCook #HorrorFiction #HorrorReviews
ETA sorry i keep editing this, having problems with posting right now...
You can’t deny the editors are committed to the bit. The book is designed to look like an old videocassette box, and the first few pages are full of dire warnings not to go any further. Iglesias’ introduction is pretty standard but Cull goes right off the deep end, cobbling together a Thin-Man style yarn about family homicide and cattle mutilation which pretends to be real, fapping about the murderer while overlooking the victims in the highest True Crime style.
By this point the gag was wearing thin, and Holly Rae Garcia’s opening story “Two Months Too Long” didn’t come a moment too soon. It’s a great piece of bad taste horror that will make you laugh while also feeling slightly unwell. The next few stories struggle to live up to this flying start, and “The Veiled Lady” by Angela Sylvaine, though good, is more about diary entries (it’s not the only tale in the book to be about writing rather than film). But there are a few great stories which are also bang on theme.
“Ghost Town Adventures” by Joe Butler is probably the closest to the classic found footage narrative, and its opening pages are for my money the scariest thing in the collection, though there’s stiff competition from “Walls and Floors and Bricks and Stone” by Georgia Cook, a highly unsettling look at the bond between families and the buildings they inhabit. Tim McGregor’s “Green Magnetic Tape” explores jealousy and old secrets within an uneasy couple in a way that is affecting as well as sinister.
“Grave Issue” by Bev Vincent is another of the writing-based stories, with a contagion narrative inspired by Ramsey Campbell, Borges and maybe later writers like Mark Samuels. Not amazingly original but still effective. And “This Video Is Unavailable” by Robert Levy is a bracing take on Youtube/Tiktok influencer culture; Levy loses the realistic voice of some of his characters at the end, which is a shame, because this kind of fiction usually stands or falls on the author's ability to hide their own hand. But it’s still a memorable story. Overall I would’ve liked to see more explorations of very recent video phenomena, but maybe that was foolish given the nostalgia-crazed cover!
So yeah, though there is a certain amount of filler here, and some of the stories felt pretty well-worn in terms of plot, if you like the collection’s theme and fragmented, multi-perspective narratives in general then I do recommend Found.
https://www.abebooks.com/9780648731535/Found-Anthology-Footage-Horror-Stories-0648731537/plp
#HollyRaeGarcia #JoeButler #TimMcgregor #GeorgiaCook #HorrorFiction #HorrorReviews
ETA sorry i keep editing this, having problems with posting right now...
Mother Suspiria 
