Review of The Dark Man by Referral by Chuck McKenzie

The Dark Man, by Referral and Less Pleasant Tales is a collection of ‘horror’ short stories. I put the horror in quote marks as the stories are not that horrific. They are more thriller stories in the tone of the Twilight Zone, with a bit of added humour. There is no blood and gore or scary shocks, but there are plenty of twists. Most of the stories are about people getting their just deserts, so readers can feel good about what happens to the characters.

The title story, The Dark Man by Referral, is a prime example of bad people getting their just deserts. It is a tale of a boy whose mother is in a relationship with an abusive man. The boy meets a mysterious dark man who gives him a toy that is not as innocuous as it looks, at least to his mother’s partner.

Confessions of a Pod Person would make a great movie. It is Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the point of view of the body snatchers. Unlike in the movie, their invasion fails, and the pod people have to deal with the consequences. This was perhaps my favourite story in the collection.

Other stories include Bad Meat, a zombie tale of sorts. While Retail Therapy will have a reader thinking about justifiable homicide, as a customer endlessly tries to bargain with a shop owner. The Eight-Beat Bar is about being tortured by a musical earworm, like having Hotel California constantly groaning on in your head until you really want to ‘check out’.

All up, there are 20 stories in the collection. Some are as little as a paragraph, while others are a lot more substantial. McKenzie concludes the book with a heart-felt outline of what inspired him to write each story. He tells us that he gave up writing for years, but now he thankfully has his muse back. All the stories have been published in other magazines and collections. Even though the stories were written over decades they seem to belong together.  

I very much enjoyed reading this collection and recommend it to anyone who has had a bad day and wants to see someone get their just deserts.