The Anechoic Chamber: and Other Weird Tales(12 Salt Modern Stories)

‘Funny, chilling, intriguing: each tale offers something different from the last, and the overall result is like listening to a perfectly made album.’ —Mark Watson An anechoic chamber is a soundproofed room with no echo. The profound silence it produces is disturbing enough. But listen carefully and you’ll hear something worse … In this new collection of uncanny short stories, award-winning author Will Wiles finds sinister creatures and subtle nightmares in mundane modern environments and bureaucracy. A cursed NHS file brings doom to whoever handles it. A memory-foam mattress breaks down the walls of sleep. A marketing executive for a property developer turns to the occult. And horror seeps from the most unexpected places: eBay purchases, boxes of holiday photographs, and the hidden corners of the smart TV menu. While mostly modern in setting, this is a collection steeped in the tradition of the weird tale and the ghost story, and includes homages to the greats of the previous century: a doomed Edwardian antiquarian is drawn into a murderous plot involving a Roman mosaic, and river boatmen uncover eldritch terror in a deserted mining town. You’ll never look at some things the same way again.

About the Author :
Will Wiles was born in India in 1978. He is the author of three literary novels, Care of Wooden Floors (Fourth Estate, 2012), The Way Inn (Fourth Estate, 2014), and Plume (Fourth Estate, 2019). Care of Wooden Floors was a Waterstones 11 pick and won a Betty Trask award. He is also the author of fantasy novel The Last Blade Priest, under the name WP Wiles, which was published by Angry Robot in July 2022.

Review :
‘A Private Square of Sky’ made the most impact on me and I thought it was worthy of the vintage ‘weird stories’ writers. It’s set in Barcelona where the sky above a particular apartment block appears to be completely different, looking into a far corner of the universe. I would recommend this book, just for the story alone! Wiles is smart and his stories are smart. ‘A Private Square of Sky’ feels like an intellectual reboot of Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. ‘Notes on London’s Housing Crisis’ could have come from the hand of William Gibson. ‘Moths’ (which concerns a sort of photographic ailment spreading from image to image) feels like the kind of thing Sapphire & Steel would have investigated once upon a time. There are other stories here every bit as good as the ones we’ve mentioned here. The Anechoic Chamber is very much an all-killer no filler read. Welcome to the off-kilter neighbourhoods in Will Wiles’ weird world, where warnings are ignored and sage advice goes unheeded, with dire consequences for his increasingly frightened characters in these nimble, shivery stories. The five funniest books of all time, according to Mark Watson I’m nominating this recently published collection of short stories for one in particular, called ‘The Meat Stream’, which is among the funniest things I’ve read in my life. But Wiles is consistently one of the most entertaining writers around at the moment.