JC BRATTON'S THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

Bratton collects four previously published horror stories in one chilling volume.

Urban legends inform these four spine-tingling tales, each of which works as a stand-alone story even as their characters and frights occasionally intersect. The lengthy opener, “Who’s at the Door,” riffs on the familiar sleepover legend of Bloody Mary. Following a car accident that breaks her foot, a 17-year-old girl stays home in suburban Ohio while her parents fly off on a two-week Hawaiian vacation. As an added measure of security, her father has installed a motion sensor on the front porch before leaving; using an app, the girl can check to see who’s at the door without having to walk downstairs. But what happens when the sensor starts going off every day at the same time—when, according to the camera, there’s no one there? In “Parasomnia,” a woman has trouble sleeping after the death of her father and the dissolution of her marriage. One night, after a mere five hours of slumber, she experiences a strange hallucination: “Upon waking, something very bizarre happened—before my closed eyes were a series of rapidly moving images in succession: crisp, high-resolution stills of unrelated people and places moving quickly along my field of vision.” One of these images is of a perfectly handsome man—so perfect that the woman tries to solve the mystery of his identity. It turns out he’s dead…and his intrusion into her life may be the opposite of perfect. “Dollhouse” concerns a man’s ill-fated purchase of a handmade Japanese dollhouse and its three toy occupants. His wife is not amused by the acquisition, and she’s thoroughly unnerved by the handwritten book that accompanies the house, which details the alarming backstories of each of the dolls. The culminating “Who’s Back at the Door” is a sequel to the first story, picking up seven years later, featuring disappearances, murders, role reversals, and more, further building on the legend of Bloody Mary.

Bratton’s prose is conversational and breezy, moving the narratives quickly from scene to scene. This approach sometimes prevents the tension that fuels these stories from fully developing, leading to moments that aren’t quite as scary as they should be, such as this passage from the collection’s first entry: “I looked at my phone. It was 3:33 AM, and there was a message saying there was motion at the door. I played the video, and I screamed in terror! There was someone at the door…” It’s a shame, because the premises are usually solid ideas that would benefit from a bit more space to breathe, particularly “Parasomnia” and “Dollhouse,” which construct intriguing worlds that don’t fully pay off. The balance feels wrong; each plot complicates itself with unnecessary exposition when it should linger in its ambiguity. The book lives up to its urban-legends theme, however, with the stories capturing the unsettling familiarity of tales passed through multiple tellers. Fans of quick, efficient thrills will likely enjoy Bratton’s collection and will anticipate the promise of future volumes to come.

A flawed but inventive selection of four creepy stories.