The Poorly Made and Other Things by Sam Rebelein

Book Review

Matthew Johns

This book is a collection of short stories – all set around the fictional Renfield County. An almost nondescript American small town, where in the late 1920s a landowner became possessed by something and murdered his family. Something evil lurked within the blood that was spilled that night, and all that the blood touched was tainted – the ground, even the wood that their house was made of. When the house was torn down, the resulting detritus was taken away to be reused by often unknowing innocents – becoming knife handles, kitchen tables, and more. Others with a more ghoulish bent about them took what they could for collections – to be kept, or resold onto those with a ‘specialist’ collection.

Interspersed with the short stories are a set of emails from Rachel Durwood to her estranged brother, Tom. Her begging him to reply to her, telling him what had happened to their mother, apologising for what separated them, and sharing the history of Renfield County.

The short stories are gruesome – tales of murder, betrayal, disfigurement, hauntings and more. A man has his eyes removed because he struggles to disconnect and switch off. Someone else captures spirits that haunt their relatives in pebbles. A group of people are able to remove body parts and swap with each other with ease. Alien abductions, a fast-food worker who finds a strange affinity with the stray cats that he feeds weekly, a man who gets lost in the woods after following a diversion, and more – much, much more.

Gruesome, but oddly captivating. Difficult to put down – the deepest, darkest parts of humanity (and otherwise) brought blinking into the light to be examined. It all feels a million miles away, but oddly close to home. It’s not difficult to see why Rebelein is Bram Stoker Award-nominated. His prose is compelling, dragging you into his world in which we see ourselves reflected back in a grotesque caricature. It’s not a book you would lend to your grandmother to read (or at least to most grandmothers – I’m sure there will be some out there that love a good horror story), but by golly – it’s good. Damned good, in fact.

These stories will stay with you long after you put the book down, and might just make you think twice about switching the light off when you go to sleep.