Synopsis
From the mind of Stoker and British Fantasy award-nominated author Philip Fracassi comes fourteen stories of the macabre that will frighten, disturb, and ensnare readers in a dark web of twisted tales.
In these pages you’ll find talking corpses and deadly tombs, misguided exorcists, technology gone wrong, blood-soaked prison riots, and enough vengeful spirits and haunted objects to fill a grave.
With an introduction by bestselling author Matt Dinniman (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Traps and Specters will chill, thrill, entertain, and leave you gasping in shock and terror at the horrors waiting within.
Review
I need to come clean; I haven’t read EVERYTHING that Philip Fracassi has ever written. However, what I have read of his (Boys In The Valley, Third Rule of Time Travel, The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, and, as of time of writing, I am halfway through Sarafina), I feel like I get a different experience every time. There’s such a variety on offer in Fracassi’s work, whether it be genre, style, theme, or tone of story, that I am always left pleasantly surprised and mildly jealous at the range available in his output.
So, diving into his forthcoming collection, TRAPS & SPECTERS, published by the always wonderful Shortwave Publishing, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to get. Obviously, I knew I was going to get a bunch of well written horror stories, but I wasn’t ready for how many – if not all – of them turned out to be nasty, biting, sharp tales that really pull no punches. Where other authors may write similarly dark stories, they can go in a direction that lessens the overall impact. Not in here, no. What happens here feels like a stab to the gut, that sense of dread of something is going from bad to worse, and there ain’t no getting better from here. Not only that, Fracassi has the gall to then reach into that wound, grab your intestines, drag them out of you like a magician’s scarf trick, and then run away laughing maniacally.
And I think this is why I just couldn’t stop reading this. Like all the best car crashes you pass on the road, something compels you to keep looking, even if your brain knows that that isn’t really a good idea. And like any good collection – and not really a surprise here due to Fracassi’s previously mentioned range of genre hopping horror goodies – you have several distinct flavours of narrative. You have sci-fi, religious horror, historical allegory, dark comedy, a fucking Tomb Raider story, and a story that caps off the whole collection at the end that wouldn’t look out of place in King’s Skeleton Crew. Each contain bold flavours in their uniqueness, and that’s twice now I’ve used the word flavour in this paragraph alone. Am I hungry whilst writing this? Yeah, I am.
Whilst there truly isn’t a dud in this, I want to shout out my favourites, including the opening story D7, a previously published story about a couple who enter a roadside bar and find that they can’t leave; The Visitor, which feels like it written for all the Boys In The Valley fans; The Mummified Corpse Of Reese Witherspoon, which I took to be some statement on AI not allowing the famous to die (I’m thinking about that videogame that was recently announced where you play a samurai warrior and TUPAC FUCKING SHAKUR is one of the main side characters), but then I just ended up laughing through most of it in the best possible way; Point Oh One, which is an episode of Black Mirror yet somehow has possibly the worst implications for everyone involved; Dream of Me, a story that contained my favourite protagonist of the bunch in Jenna, alongside my favourite antagonist; and Red Leather, which is the story that I feel like is a homage to King’s style of short story telling, in a way that I think would be heralded as one of the man’s better small tales.
Overall, I think you can tell that I liked this one. Yeah, I liked this one a lot. Every story will hook you and drive you onto the next because you just can’t stop looking at the carnage, and this continues to cement Fracassi as one my favourite, and one of the industry’s best, modern horror storytellers currently working. Even if the stories he likes to tell are spiteful little bastards that make your withered soul sing for the chaos of it all.
Thanks to Shortwave for the ARC!
Traps & Specters releases Sept 22, 2026!
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