Last Light: A Collection of Short Stories Book Review

Disclosure: I was given an electronic copy of the story by the author and Henry Roi in exchange for an honest review. 

With Halloween coming up, I figured it was time to read something on the spookier side. Recently, I came across the book Last Light: A Collection of Short Stories by Chris Coppel. Normally, I don’t actively seek out horror stories, but this collection gripped me with its eerie and paranoid tales.

I would usually provide my own summary here, but the actual one does a better job.

“What really happens at last light? 

Last Light will give you just enough illumination to see into the wonders and horrors that dwell deep within the darkest shadows. These tales will both entrance and terrify. Scared of the dark? Let Last Light guide you safely through these stories of the paranormal and terror that surrounds us all.”

There are nine stories in this collection, and most of them deal with the psychological side of horror. This specifically includes the paranormal and the paranoia. In case anybody is wondering about the amount of gore in them, there really isn’t any. The only thing that they have in common is how they depict the titular sight, usually as the last things the characters see. 

Each tale shows horror in similar and different ways. In Labour Shortage, a woman working for the British government drives out to a rural English town to see how the locals are growing their crops so quickly and consistently. Let’s just say it involves the supernatural. Lightning Strike deals with paranoia as a Silicon-Valley tycoon tries to protect himself and his new house from the elements after a fire consumes the old one. Lost Words is a retelling of the classic Faust tale, in which an author gives his soul to the devil in order to write one great novel. That one has a pretty clever ending. In Light Dusting, the main character’s brother gets executed for murdering his date. Years later, his sons find their dead uncle’s clothes and put them on a snowman during a rare snow day in Florida. This brings it to life. It’s like Frosty the Snowman if he was on a revenge spree even though I was confused as to why the dead brother’s clothes would bring a snowman to life.

There were two things that I found interesting with this collection. One was that every title started with the letter “L.” I found that it’s Coppel’s trademark because he’s got other books with the same letter from Lucy (his debut novel) to Lunacy (his second most recent one). Sesame Street would be very proud. 

The other was that the first and last stories contained hope. The former titled Living Water involves a rich old businessman wanting to go to a fountain of youth on tribal land in Utah despite the warnings of what happened to others when they did the same thing. The latter story titled Lasting Memories revolves around a man who was recently released from prison trying to rebuild his life when he meets an elderly lady in the same apartment building that he lives in. Coppel makes Living Water and Lasting Memories seem like they are going to be terrifying just by the way things are set up in both. Even the main character in the latter thinks that the old woman is going to seduce him like the one did to Jim Carrey in the film Yes Man. And yet, they are hopeful, and even in the case of the Lasting Memories, heartwarming. It’s clear to see the Stephen King influence on Coppel, yet the author still makes his stories his own.

My favorite stories from this collection are Lasting Memories, Last Touch, and Long Shadows. The former is about a 12-year-old boy who has the knowledge of when someone is going to die within 24 hours just by shaking their hand and feeling a shock. Complications arise when he realizes that every person who shook his hand receives that same shock. It’s one of the shortest tales in the collection, but it packs a punch. I seriously wanted this boy to figure out what was going on and solve it. Sadly, there is no hope in that one. The other story Long Shadows involves a successful horror writer who gets invited to an exclusive dinner in New Orleans. He is then told about the titular creatures who believe that the authors are writing about them and want them destroyed. These monsters are similar to the Weeping Angels in the modern Doctor Who in the eerie way Coppel writes about them. The main difference is how one should confront them. With the shadows, one has to not look directly at them, while with the Weeping Angels, one has to not blink. Unfortunately, the main character in Long Shadows gets too big for his britches and defies the rules. Afterwards, I yelled, “You should’ve listened to the guy!”

The one that I wasn’t crazy about was Lethal Assignment. That one told the tale of a teenaged boy who spends time playing an assassin-based video game and discovers similar murders occurring in real time around the world. The concept is very unique, for there are not a whole lot of science fiction-based horror stories nor ones that involve video games. I would love to see more of these. However, this one simply got a little too intricate to follow. I still enjoyed what I could of it.

All in all, Last Light: A Collection of Short Stories by Chris Coppel was an entertaining psychological horror collection. They mostly did a great job of entrancing and terrifying me. I also found it surprising that some of them contain hope in the face of abject terror. I would recommend this to readers who enjoy short stories, prefer ones with less gore, and love horror overall. The book is out tomorrow, Tuesday, September 26, so go get it soon! In the meantime, I’m going to read another one of Coppel’s works, Lunacy. No way it’ll be my last light with Coppel.

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