Breakfast At Libraries

For years I read a lot of short horror stories (I particularly loved them when I was a child) and some had a great impact on me, but somehow I'd got out of the habit in recent years. I don't know if this is because there are fewer horror collections on the shelves in large bookshops these days, or simply because I drifted away from them, but either way I feel as if the short horror story is something that was quite influential on me when I was younger but which I've neglected in the last decade or two.

I was interested, then, to read Howard David Ingham's This Is Not A Picture. It's a collection of eight stories that deal with "haunted sights and sounds, grief and anxiety, terror and loss". A man meets up with an old friend only to find that he's undergone some unnerving changes since their last meeting. An envelope of Polaroid pictures reveals images of a dystopian parallel Britain. Some 'lost' BBC recordings have a terrifying effect on the e…