Mood Swings is the 36th entry in Black Shuck Books’ Black Shuck Shadows series, micro-collections of peculiar tales. It’s a series which consistently delivers. Black Shuck Books are one of those publishers you can really count on for a quality product.
In Mood Swings, you’ll find 8 tales from Dave Jeffery, each uniquely presenting some kind of horror, but with a range extending from heartfelt tales to truly hideous horrors.
‘Restoring Scarlet’ tells the tale of a gifted individual finding beauty in death and holding onto that. Some of the imagery around death is beautifully presented (in all of its tragedy). I could make a joke about it being a story about a Faith healer, but it would be lost on you until you read it.
‘Once’ is a heartbreaking tale of loss through dementia. It captures that horror of a death by degrees, a loss that hits you again and again, but with it there are memories of the good times and bad that meant so much. It’s simultaneously awful, yet touching, and very skilfully written.
As tender and sweet as ‘Once’ is, ‘Last Rose of Summer’ is the opposite. This is Jeffery giving us a character to truly make our skin crawl. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to watch for long through his eyes, but the story twists and turns. At times, I thought I’d got where it was going, only for it to pivot in another direction, then it twists again, bringing me back to my initial thoughts.
‘Masquerade’ is another tale with an unpleasant narrator, though it’s a very different story. It’s an intriguing premise of one stuck in some kind of hellish purgatory who seeks a way out through manipulating another.
In ‘Where There’s a Will…’ Jeffery demonstrates how he can tell a story that develops over a lifetime in but a handful of pages. Again, it shows the importance of family relationships and the damage fractured ones can do.
I was very surprised to find that ‘Disturbia’ was written pre-pandemic. Looking at it today, it reflects a lot of the control, a lot of the fear, and a lot of the paranoia of 2020. The ‘bulletins’ in the story tell our narrator how to cope with the rehabilitating panic that has swept the nation. Beyond the pandemic, it also reflects the awful mental health crisis we’re currently experiencing.
‘Different’ contains some pretty grim ideas and descriptions and saying much at all will give it away. Let’s just say a man wishes to be reunited with his estranged wife and very much comes to regret it!
The collection is rounded off with ‘And Your Fear Shall Define You’ about a rather selfish man cursed with those very words. Of all the stories, which contain many monstrous people doing monstrous things, this is the one that comes closest to bringing us an actual monster.
Mood swings is a collection which continually captivates and sometimes surprises. It’s full of truly awful things, but it’s often uplifting too, with many of the characters getting what they deserve. It’s beautifully written, too. There were often times I paused to take in a particular description or an apt simile that painted a picture so vividly. Highly recommended.