In the Porches of My Ears

These 17 horror shorts from Prentiss (Four Legs in the Morning) meld the macabre and otherworldly with the mundanity of day-to-day life. In the eponymous story, a cinephile couple receives a strange prophecy that will change the course of their lives. “The Old Ways” follows a young woman who gets blamed for a man’s heart attack by a mob of the elderly. In the stomach-churning “Glue Traps,” a man tells his musophobic partner about strange occurrences on the night he put mouse traps in their home. “Burls” sees a tourist overcome with disgust at humanity as the surreal surroundings of Alcatraz Island invade his brain. Family and friends stage repeated interventions to convince a ghost to move on in “The Man Who Could Not Be Bothered to Die.” Prentiss’s understated style works excellently for the subject matter—there’s a creeping menace under many of his stories that worms its way beneath the reader’s skin before it can even be noticed. The richness of detail occasionally comes at the cost of narrative momentum, however, and Prentiss’s many asides can make it a challenge to grasp where each story is headed. Still, the extravagant strangeness of these detours is part of the charm. Weird fiction readers will find a lot to love here. (Jan.)