Fortunately, about a half of the stories keeps to the right side and manages to reach the goal horror should always attend: making the reader’s flesh creep while entertaining him in the safety of his/her armchair.

Let’s stick, then, to the good stuff, starting with Christine Poulson’s ‘Safe as Houses’, a nice, atmospheric piece effectively blending the ghostly shadows born of a painful miscarriage and the high-tec of a “smart house” system.

Another winner is Jeremy Dyson’s ‘The Coué’, a captivating yarn where a curio dealer secures a rare, disquieting item bound to change his life.

‘Lancashire’ by Nicholas Royle, is a perfectly timed, distressing piece describing how a visit to newly acquired friends plunges a young couple into a veritable nightmare.

Paul Magrs contributes ‘The Foster Parents’, a delightful, dark fairy tale featuring a pair of weird neighbours and a bunch of children unaccounted for, while Conrad Williams provides ‘Tight Wrappers’, the lucid account of a man’s fatal obsession with rare book editions.

Horror veteran Ramsey Campbell graces the book with the excellent and frightening ‘Digging Deep’, a tale about a man buried alive, whose attempts to get help from the outside meet with an even more terrifying outcome.

Finally ‘Mortal Coil’ by Robert Shearman constitutes a bittersweet reflection on death as our basic, unavoidable fear, told in a solid, compelling narrative style.

On the whole, a fair enough debut for Comma Press in the perilous world of horror anthologies I understand more are in the pipeline. I’ll keep watch for them.