Mood Swings by Dave Jeffery

Book Review

Ben Unsworth

From a master of delicate, emotional horror, Dave Jeffery presents his newest collection, MOOD SWINGS. Within its pages, five of his previously published stories are collected alongside three new ones, all of which certainly live up to the collection’s title. There’s a distinctly Poe-esque mood to this set of stories, and Jeffery finds a way to pluck emotional strings you probably didn’t know you possessed; at the forefront of this collection’s emotional harpsichord, however, is something just as brilliant – your inability to put it down.

Opening the collection is ‘Restoring Scarlet’, a tale with both reverence for the genre and a love of sinking a pair of gnashers into it, giving a tale of a mortician who has an intriguing relationship with his patients. He fixes their mortal wounds and damages after death, using his “Faith” upon them in time for their final journey – the question is what the other half of the arrangement is… There’s something rather beautiful in this first story; although it doesn’t outright scare or upset you, it manages slowly to make you fall in love with the macabre and also make it linger at the back of your mind like some terrifying Bogeyman.

The next story published elsewhere first is ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, which continues the darkly poetic threads that Jeffery plucks and weaves so well, this time telling a tale from a killer’s perspective of his slow pursuit of Rose Delaware, the latest in his line of victims – but this killer has drawn the attention of another predator. In a collection where twists and turns are lesser than the emotional richness behind it all, it’s nice that, in this instance, Jeffery manages to turn the tables on your expectations – the twists themselves don’t necessarily break new ground, yet they’re dealt with extremely carefully, and there isn’t a single word that feels gratuitous, the result being you end up in a slight void afterwards where you’re not only reeling but also cursing yourself for finding it unnerving.

His award-nominated short story ‘Masquerade’ is next, serving up a spirit-cum-possession yarn concerning a ghost finding a way to take over a young woman called Emily. One of this story’s leading strengths is that it proves, in certain segments, just how powerful an intangible story can be. However, in equally flavoursome supply is the dark body horror of the story’s other main character, the Paymaster, who must, to some degree, be an ode to the various worlds of Clive Barker. It’s a nice demonstration of an inward story being allowed to ramify into a wider array of forces while keeping true to the quiet horror genre.

‘Where There’s a Will’ continues the idea of wider forces at play concerning an orderly who is, in fact, a demon talking to a man about to die about all the woes and ways he failed his son. The end result is a delicate tale, clearly one with a heart and soul despite its ethically lacking orderly, and it emerges as one of Jeffery’s less introspective stories; that isn’t to the story’s disadvantage, though, as amongst eight tales of raw emotion it is nice to have one with cynicism and a tongue-in-cheek nature. It isn’t the twisty-turny fiasco that many authors would turn it into, but instead, it’s thoroughly melancholic, and there’s something truly unsettling about knowing where a story is inevitably going. It’s an attempt at something far more versatile and refreshing than simply humour and cynicism, and the Gaiman-mood woven into it is an interesting and welcome one. 

‘Disturbia’, however, returns the collection into a miniature examination of the human mind, this time in a tale that will bring to mind a lot of the tensions and paranoias of Covid despite the fact it was originally published in 2017. This story follows Mark Winters, a man trying to have the semblance of Arcadian bliss in spite of “The Great Fear” gripping the world, with his main contact with the outside world being the sight of a truck each day and “the bulletins”, which he obeys to the letter. It’s a clever little exploration of the human psyche, and it even flirts with the ideas of governmental conspiracies, although all of it is given voice in a visceral way – and, out of perhaps all the stories, it’s the most relenting yet in the subtlest of ways.

However, of the three stories original to this collection, the first is ‘Once’. This story benefits from you approaching it blind – but it is, at heart, a love story. Despite the fact that it’s the shortest of all the stories out of every story collected here, it’s also where the Edgar Allen Poe ambience exerts its grip most firmly. It shrouds itself in the hallmarks of a ghost story – or, in Poe’s terms, the tragedy in his story ‘Ligeia’ – but Jeffery finds something a little deeper and exploits it to welcome effect. It’s another that isn’t outwardly scary as such, but by the end of the tale, if you aren’t deeply conscious of your own mortality, you need to re-read it.

The second original story, and the entire collection’s penultimate one, is ‘Different’, a title which sums up this story perfectly. It’s All Hallows Eve, and Henry Potts is determined, thanks to GRAVES, INC., to try and resolve his marriage to Marjorie and thereby assuage his guilt – over her suicide… Things descend downhill from there until Jeffery serves up an ending which, in the world of films, would be Rob Bottin or Rick Baker’s wet dream. Emotions writhe at the surface of this story, but that doesn’t stop the seriously sinister tangents it adopts too, and for all, it quickly departs from Jeffery’s usual style of quiet horror, it’s still one of this collection’s highlights. There’s the cliche that the best is kept until last – and perhaps that’s a cliche for a reason. The third original story and eighth of the titular mood swings is ‘And Your Fear Shall Define You’, a story which, even if it is not the best of this collection, ends it on the right balance of emotion and bizarre. After a strange experience with a traveller on Michael’s lawn,

who proceeds to curse, Michael visits Dr. Sheridan to discuss the “Becoming” he feels is going on within him, only for it to soon spiral out of control. Here, the collection reignites the body horror of ‘Masquerade’ and ‘Different’, but the more intimate dimensions are weaved into the story with genuine realism despite their prosaic manner; and like the end of a symphony, there’s a feeling of the collection reaching a crescendo beyond simply this story reaching the final page. Certainly, to anyone familiar with the strange and uncertain atmospheres of a therapist’s office, it will strike an extra chord, bringing another dimension to these tales of emotion-meets-horror.

In short, MOOD SWINGS is a triumph for both Dave Jeffery and the publisher, Black Shuck Books. Whether it manages anything truly terrifying will depend on the reader; however, the universal effect that will emerge is a sense of unease and, in some ways, more disturbingly, a very conscious acknowledgement of your own mortality and emotion.