The Anechoic Chamber and Other Weird Tales by Will Wiles Review

Of the nine stories in Will Wiles’ short story collection, The Anechoic Chamber and Other Weird Tales, about two were ok and the others were generally quite bad.

The Meat Stream was a bizarre Cronenberg-esque piece set during lockdown when a couple, bored of having watched everything available, notice a new streaming service called HUNGER and the man becomes obsessed with watching a stream of a kebab. And then the TV starts doing odd things… Very original, unpredictable story with a slightly humorous bent to it, this was the best of a poor bunch.

A Private Square of Sky is set in Barcelona in an artistically-designed block of flats that holds a strange secret in its courtyard: a glimpse, at night, into another realm, or possibly ours, in the past, present or future, but only to residents and only in a small square of sky within the development.

Wiles uses his knowledge of architecture (another hat he wears is that of an architectural journalist) to set a compelling scene and the mystery of the flats was intriguing. The ending was wonderfully creepy too - an unexpected Lovecraftian twist.

A few other stories - Moths, A Report to the Imperial Customs Office, The Acknowledgements - are similarly horror-flavoured, with hints of ghosts and madness-influenced murders spackling the pages. But, like Lovecraft, Wiles is often less overt in his horror and the remaining stories are in that horror-adjacent subgenre of weird fiction so I think the title is aptly named.

Unfortunately the other seven stories range from forgettable to boring. There are some interesting premises - a chamber of a silence most profound in the title story or a puzzle that foretells the future in Tesserae - but Wiles’ rendering of them is weak and often too vague and underwhelming. One story - Deeds - completely escapes me, it was that dull.

Will Wiles wrote a great novel - Plume - that I’d recommend checking out, but his short fiction collected in The Anechoic Chamber and Other Weird Tales is much less impressive and disappointing.