Bound in Blood

If you are reading this, you have some interest in books, enough to read a review about one. Bound in Blood is not just a book, this is a book about books. Well at least a collection of spooky short stories about books, authors, libraries, and all things bibliophile. For those of us in the know, there is magic in books from finding that novel you wanted in a secondhand store, to cracking open a new release and enjoying that new book smell. Books draw you in and take you to unfamiliar places, but what happens if you find yourself in a place you do not want to go? 

Bound has been edited by Johnny Mains and is a curated set of mostly new short stories. The remit is that the stories must be somehow linked to books (although a couple are only very thinly so). What links books? There seems to be a magic to them that draws someone in. Is this an addiction? Something that can be exploited by others? A theme that seems to run through the stories is that books are a gateway between this world and another. These tales about stories lean towards the surreal type of magic that is hard to pin down. This works well for some stories in the collection, but others seem to fall off the boil towards their end. 

I will focus on the stories I enjoyed the most. These mostly had the best structure and the firmest grip on the brief. Footnotes by A. K Benedict tells the story of a young academic who finds an unusual job in the library inscribing the futures of people onto her skin. The story is told in a way that evokes the language of reading in its footnotes and highlights the obsessive control that books can have on a real bibliophile. 

Broken Back Man by Lucie McKnight Hardy and Book Worm by Isy Suttie are just the type of story I would hope for from a horror short story anthology. They are compact little tales that paint a picture and then turn the story on its head. Book Worm is more in keeping with the core theme, but both are excellent tales. 

Several of the stories in Bound take on a mercurial feel and I found they did not quite land. Perhaps they should have pushed that little bit further? Beneath the Diaphragm, the Gut Itself by Robert Shearman does just this and introduces a world where people literally birth a book. As a teen each person gives birth to a piece of text that has already been ordained from the greatest classics to a useless pamphlet. It is a story that raises so many questions that it cannot possibly answer, but the surreal and absurdist story works so well because it is knowingly out there. 

The best short story is one of the only two older stories, The Man Who Collected Barker by Kim Newman is your classic horror gut punch of a short story. A wonderful idea that builds to its conclusion. This story is from 1990 and has aged well. In fact, it highlights some of the rawness elsewhere in the collection. Choosing from decades of short stories will, in most cases, derive a stronger compilation as only the best will survive the competition. Some of the stories contained in Bound may crop up in a future 2058 anthology, but I sense that many will not. A collection that will work for those who love horror and books, but not the strongest just for horror fans.