Advance Review: SIX O’CLOCK HOUSE AND OTHER STRANGE TALES

by | Nov 18, 2024 | Book Reviews, Reviews, The Horror Review News | 0 comments

Six O’Clock House and Other Strange Tales
Rebecca Cuthbert
Watertower Hill Publishing (January 2025)
Reviewed by Nora B. Peevy

Rebecca Cuthbert has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Award. After reading this collection, I can see why. Six O’Clock House delivered a collection of quiet but creepy stories. A bunch of them filled with revenge and left me, as the reader feeling unsettled by the end of the tale. In “Joiner,” you will meet a waitress who becomes the victim of one of her regulars. In “Twist of Jack and Jill,” one of my personal favorites, Cuthbert turns the fairytale on its head with a lesbian romance. “Hey, Stranger” invites you to meet probably one of the most loveable ghosts I’ve ever met. And “Six O’Clock House” is a women’s revenge story.

The themes of this book are revenge and self-discovery when it’s too late to do anything to change your story. Ah, don’t both of things happen every day to people everywhere? That’s what makes this collection quietly chilling. I like Cuthbert’s finesse with words and plots that sneak up on you like a noose waiting for you in a dark hallway. Gentle horror is a talent slowly replaced for jump scares and blood and gore in today’s body of horror work, so it’s refreshing to see a writer following a more traditional approach.

About Nora B. Peevy

Nora B. Peevy is a cat trapped in a human’s body. Please send help or tuna. She toils away for JournalStone and Trepidatio Publishing as a submissions reader, is a co-editor for Alien Sun Press, the newest reviewer for Hellnotes, and has been published by Eighth Tower Press, Weird Fiction Quarterly, and other places. Usually, you can find her on Facebook asking for help escaping from her human body or to get tuna. Tuna is nice. Cats like tuna.

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