17 horror Stories. One legendary music venue. We all know the old cliché: Sex, drugs and rock and roll. Now, add demons, other dimensions, monsters, revenge, human sacrifice, and a dash of the truly inexplicable. This is the story of the (fictional) San Francisco music venue, The Shantyman.In Welcome to the Show, seventeen of today’s hottest writers of horror and dark fiction come together in … hottest writers of horror and dark fiction come together in devilish harmony to trace The Shantyman’s history from its disturbing birth through its apocalyptic encore.
Featuring stories by Brian Keene, John Skipp, Mary SanGiovanni, Robert Ford, Max Booth III, Glenn Rolfe, Matt Hayward, Bryan Smith, Matt Serafini, Kelli Owen, Jonathan Janz, Patrick Lacey, Adam Cesare, Alan M Clark, Somer Canon, Rachel Autumn Deering and Jeff Strand.
Compiled by Matt Hayward. Edited by Doug Murano.
Bring your curiosity, but leave your inhibitions at the door. The show is about to begin…
TOC:
- Alan M Clark – What Sort of Rube
- Jonathan Janz – Night and Day and in Between
- John Skipp – In the Winter of No Love
- Patrick Lacey – Wolf with Diamond Eyes
- Bryan Smith – Pilgrimage
- Rachel Autumn Deering – A Tongue like Fire
- Glenn Rolfe – Master of Beyond
- Matt Hayward – Dark Stage
- Kelli Owen – Open Mic Night
- Matt Serafini – Beat on the Past
- Max Booth III – True Starmen
- Somer Canon – Just to be Seen
- Jeff Strand – Parody
- Robert Ford – Ascending
- Adam Cesare – The Southern Thing
- Brian Keene – Running Free
- Mary SanGiovanni – We Sang in Darkness
Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.
Interview with compiler Matt Hayward:
What makes this horror anthology so special?
A: The book is as much an anthology as it is a collaborative novel. Each story explores the history of the Shantyman, a haunted music venue located in San Francisco with a long and bloody past. With the likes of John Skipp, Brian Keene, and Rachel Autumn Deering involved, we not only see the venue change throughout the decades, but also from changing perspectives, everything from psychological horror to extreme horror, and even a splash of comedy.
Q: Tell us more about the venue and the history of the building?
The Shantyman’s history is the product of author/illustrator Alan M Clark. Alan usually tackles historical horror, and I wouldn’t have chosen anyone else to take on the task. What Alan delivered was a seven-thousand-word horror juggernaut set in San Francisco’s gold rush era, involving a traveling singer who gets shanghaied. I won’t ruin any surprises, but there are cannibals. Alan sets the gruesome scene from which every other story stems.
Q: What made you think of this theme for the anthology?
A: About a year ago, I attended a comedy show at a famous music venue here in Dublin. The main room was seated, and the audience rather docile. A few weeks later, Rachel Autumn Deering and I attended John Carpenter in the very same room, but once we stepped through the doors, I hardly recognized the place. I was instantly hit with that ‘eureka’ moment for the book.
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4.5/5 stars!
WELCOME TO THE SHOW is a themed anthology with all of the stories revolving around, (or involving in some way), a rock ‘n’ roll club named The Shantyman. That’s it! There’s no hard thread connecting all the tales other than the club itself. That makes WELCOME TO THE SHOW different because there’s no one “bad guy” to blame things on. In this case, the “bad guy” is anyone or anything the writer wanted them to be. In this regard, I think the authors involved had a lot more leeway as far as the direction each story would take and I think that resulted in an above average anthology as far as the quality AND the variety of the stories within.
I can’t get into all of them here, because I don’t want this review to be as long as the book itself, but the ones that stood out the most to me were:
WHAT SORT OF RUBE by Alan M. Clark. A was a perfect start to this book, providing a bit of history and setting the tone. (I’ve never read any of Clark’s work before, but he’s on my radar now.)
NIGHT AND DAY AND IN BETWEEN by Jonathan Janz. This story went in a totally different direction than what I had expected. Loved it!
TRUE STARMEN by Max Booth. I’m not sure that it was supposed to, but this story cracked me the hell me up! It’s the first time The Shantyman hosted pod-casters instead of a band, and the results just made me laugh.
OPEN MIC NIGHT by Kelli Owen. The 27 Club-you know, those singers and musicians that never made it past that age? I thought this anthology would be a shoe-in for stories about that club, but this was the only one. I was glad because it made this tale stand out even more.
PARODY by Jeff Strand. Zany Chester and his plans to be the next Weird Al fizzle out before they even got started. (It’s birdies, not bodies!) Chester had to go to a few back up plans, actually, and none of them were pretty.
DARK STAGE by Matt Hayward. This tale spoke to me in a personal way which made it that much more horrifying at the end.
A TONGUE LIKE FIRE by Rachel Autumn Deering. The end was NOT what I was expecting at the beginning. Usually I can see that coming..in this case I saw something coming, but not what I got. Well done!
Brian Keene’s tale RUNNING FREE made me laugh at the premise before it got all serious. (A man trying to run himself to death by heart attack, thereby evading death from the cancer already running through his body. Come on, that’s kind of funny! [All right, I know I’m messed up.]) Anyway, this story didn’t go the way I thought it would and I loved how it tied into previous tales in this book.
WE SING IN DARKNESS by Mary SanGiovanni. This story had everything that I’ve come to expect from Mary’s work. A terrifying future where music is banned is only the beginning.
I enjoyed this collection and even though it was a little uneven throughout, the variety and quality more than made up for that. I liked that everyone didn’t have quite the same view was to what was going on at The Shantyman because that allowed for more creativity in the tales. Variety is the spice of life and all that, you know?
I read a lot of collections and anthologies over the course of a year and there is no doubt in my mind that WELCOME TO THE SHOW will be among the best I’ve read this year. For this reason, I highly recommend it!
You can get your copy here: https://amzn.to/2RQ6a50
*11.12.18 We are currently reading this book, along with most of the authors in the Horror Aficionados Group at Goodreads. Feel free to join us, read along, and ask questions of the writers, if you like! (Our read continues until the end of this month.) Here’s a link: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/…*
**I bought this book with my hard earned cash and these opinions are my own.*
Although themed anthologies are common in today’s publishing, they are, more often than not, focused on a concept or ephemeral idea, like the recent Lost Highways anthology, also from Crystal Lake Publishing, where each story played on the concept of life on the road. Rarer are those anthologies, at least outside of media tie-in properties, where the stories are united by a shared world concept, with the focus aimed toward a singular location. Matt Hayward’s Welcome to the Show could have very easily been a basic themed anthology built around the premise of music, and likely that alone would have been a very successful and creative endeavor. Thankfully, Hayward had grander ambitions here, creating his own shared-world property for some of horror’s best authors to come in and play.
Welcome to the Show isn’t just about the music or the soundtrack of these characters lives. It’s about the Shantyman, a dive-bar with a seriously warped history. Over the course of its existence, the Shantyman has been the starting point to some of music’s most popular performers. It has also been the site of massacres, suicides, hauntings, and, quite possibly, the apocalypse, depending on which particular reality that world’s Shantyman resides in. The Shantyman is, in short, a place of legend.
In this reality, at least, the Shantyman is also a hell of an excuse to show off the horror genre’s elasticity and showcase some of the best writers in the business. The table of contents alone is a billet of who’s who in horror, presenting veteran authors and younger up-and-comers who have already made impressive names for themselves. Brian Keene, Mary SanGiovanni, John Skipp, Bob Ford, Adam Cesare, Patrick Lacey, Matt Serafini, Glenn Rolfe, Kelli Owen, Jonathan Janz, Somer Canon, Rachel Autumn Deering, Jeff Strand, and more. It’s a sheer smorgasbord, an anthology curator’s wet dream, of horror writers all sandwiched together between two covers.
Between seventeen authors we get demons, ghosts, vampires, killers, psychopaths, and inter-dimensional Eldritch forces. There’s romances and lost loves, time travel, kidnappings, cults, science experiments gone awry, and even a few laughs. Max Booth III opens up the Shantyman’s doors for a live podcast show and a discussion about pegging (if you’re unfamiliar with pegging, I’d advise you to not Google that at work). Jeff Strand, an author who routinely pens horror stories with a comedic bent, presents one of the most seriously uncomfortable stories about a man who thinks he’s funny but isn’t. His story, “Parody,” is a painful read, akin to watching a highway pile-up in slow motion, as Zany Chester tries to take over the Shantyman’s stage and out-do “Weird Al” Yankovic with disastrous, decidedly not zany, results.
Disaster and the Shantyman, unfortunately, go hand in hand. Throughout, characters suffer disasters big and small, personal and otherworldly. Rolfe gives us an encounter with evil in “Master of Beyond,” as a few employees use their time off to play with Ouija board, which is, of course, always the best idea ever. Skipp’s “In the Winter of No Love” is a fantastically written tale of love, drugs, and rock and roll in the waning days of the 1960’s sexual revolution. “Open Mic Night” by Kelli Owen touches on my favorite music topics in her exploration of the 27 Club. The Shantyman is home to curses and cures, oftentimes more one than the other, and sometimes those forces are inextricably entwined as Matt Hayward demonstrates in his “Dark Stage,” as the Shantyman’s sound engineer is forced to retire from his crippling arthritis.
Over the course of Welcome to the Show, these authors explore the past, present, and future of the Shantyman. Some do their own thing, others build on the works they share space with, but throughout there exists a clear continuity that gives the Shantyman a sense of realness, a sense of history, a depth of existence. Brian Keene encapsulates this beautifully in the final moments of his short story, “Running Free,” about a mobster who finds out he has cancer and takes up running, hoping he’ll die of a heart attack instead. Even after mankind’s experiments with sound and vibrations have accidentally ripped open holes to other dimensions and music has been outlawed, the Shantyman still stands and draws in – or perhaps lures is more apt – those seeking the soulful connection and magic of music. Mary SanGiovanni takes us into the dive bar’s near future in “We Sang in Darkness,” a story that showcases her strong talents as a Lovecraftian writer.
The Shantyman is real. It exists, because it has been given life by the authors here. Each have conspired to erect this portal through space and time, and they’ve opened its doors for all to enter, particularly – especially – the unwary and the uncertain. Visiting the Shantyman, you’ll find that this establishment’s acts are at their best when they quietly sneak up on you and surprise, as Adam Cesare does in “The Southern Thing.” As an idea, the Shantyman is certainly one that feels fresh, unique, and wholly welcome, the kind of idea that has so much potential you can’t help but want more. I certainly hope the Shantyman’s doors haven’t been closed quite yet. I’d like to enjoy a few more shows still, and there are a few particular performers I’d love to see showcased in a return engagement. Maybe one day, if the cosmos align just so. For those visiting the Shantyman for the first time, welcome, and enjoy the show.
4.5/5 stars!
WELCOME TO THE SHOW is a themed anthology with all of the stories revolving around, (or involving in some way), a rock ‘n’ roll club named The Shantyman. That’s it! There’s no hard thread connecting all the tales other than the club itself. That makes WELCOME TO THE SHOW different because there’s no one “bad guy” to blame things on. In this case, the “bad guy” is anyone or anything the writer wanted them to be. In this regard, I think the authors involved had a lot more leeway as far as the direction each story would take and I think that resulted in an above average anthology as far as the quality AND the variety of the stories within.
I can’t get into all of them here, because I don’t want this review to be as long as the book itself, but the ones that stood out the most to me were:
WHAT SORT OF RUBE by Alan M. Clark. A was a perfect start to this book, providing a bit of history and setting the tone. (I’ve never read any of Clark’s work before, but he’s on my radar now.)
NIGHT AND DAY AND IN BETWEEN by Jonathan Janz. This story went in a totally different direction than what I had expected. Loved it!
TRUE STARMEN by Max Booth. I’m not sure that it was supposed to, but this story cracked me the hell me up! It’s the first time The Shantyman hosted pod-casters instead of a band, and the results just made me laugh.
OPEN MIC NIGHT by Kelli Owen. The 27 Club-you know, those singers and musicians that never made it past that age? I thought this anthology would be a shoe-in for stories about that club, but this was the only one. I was glad because it made this tale stand out even more.
PARODY by Jeff Strand. Zany Chester and his plans to be the next Weird Al fizzle out before they even got started. (It’s birdies, not bodies!) Chester had to go to a few back up plans, actually, and none of them were pretty.
DARK STAGE by Matt Hayward. This tale spoke to me in a personal way which made it that much more horrifying at the end.
A TONGUE LIKE FIRE by Rachel Autumn Deering. The end was NOT what I was expecting at the beginning. Usually I can see that coming..in this case I saw something coming, but not what I got. Well done!
Brian Keene’s tale RUNNING FREE made me laugh at the premise before it got all serious. (A man trying to run himself to death by heart attack, thereby evading death from the cancer already running through his body. Come on, that’s kind of funny! [All right, I know I’m messed up.]) Anyway, this story didn’t go the way I thought it would and I loved how it tied into previous tales in this book.
WE SING IN DARKNESS by Mary SanGiovanni. This story had everything that I’ve come to expect from Mary’s work. A terrifying future where music is banned is only the beginning.
I enjoyed this collection and even though it was a little uneven throughout, the variety and quality more than made up for that. I liked that everyone didn’t have quite the same view was to what was going on at The Shantyman because that allowed for more creativity in the tales. Variety is the spice of life and all that, you know?
I read a lot of collections and anthologies over the course of a year and there is no doubt in my mind that WELCOME TO THE SHOW will be among the best I’ve read this year. For this reason, I highly recommend it!
You can get your copy here: https://amzn.to/2RQ6a50
*11.12.18 We are currently reading this book, along with most of the authors in the Horror Aficionados Group at Goodreads. Feel free to join us, read along, and ask questions of the writers, if you like! (Our read continues until the end of this month.) Here’s a link: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/…*
**I bought this book with my hard earned cash and these opinions are my own.*
Although themed anthologies are common in today’s publishing, they are, more often than not, focused on a concept or ephemeral idea, like the recent Lost Highways anthology, also from Crystal Lake Publishing, where each story played on the concept of life on the road. Rarer are those anthologies, at least outside of media tie-in properties, where the stories are united by a shared world concept, with the focus aimed toward a singular location. Matt Hayward’s Welcome to the Show could have very easily been a basic themed anthology built around the premise of music, and likely that alone would have been a very successful and creative endeavor. Thankfully, Hayward had grander ambitions here, creating his own shared-world property for some of horror’s best authors to come in and play.
Welcome to the Show isn’t just about the music or the soundtrack of these characters lives. It’s about the Shantyman, a dive-bar with a seriously warped history. Over the course of its existence, the Shantyman has been the starting point to some of music’s most popular performers. It has also been the site of massacres, suicides, hauntings, and, quite possibly, the apocalypse, depending on which particular reality that world’s Shantyman resides in. The Shantyman is, in short, a place of legend.
In this reality, at least, the Shantyman is also a hell of an excuse to show off the horror genre’s elasticity and showcase some of the best writers in the business. The table of contents alone is a billet of who’s who in horror, presenting veteran authors and younger up-and-comers who have already made impressive names for themselves. Brian Keene, Mary SanGiovanni, John Skipp, Bob Ford, Adam Cesare, Patrick Lacey, Matt Serafini, Glenn Rolfe, Kelli Owen, Jonathan Janz, Somer Canon, Rachel Autumn Deering, Jeff Strand, and more. It’s a sheer smorgasbord, an anthology curator’s wet dream, of horror writers all sandwiched together between two covers.
Between seventeen authors we get demons, ghosts, vampires, killers, psychopaths, and inter-dimensional Eldritch forces. There’s romances and lost loves, time travel, kidnappings, cults, science experiments gone awry, and even a few laughs. Max Booth III opens up the Shantyman’s doors for a live podcast show and a discussion about pegging (if you’re unfamiliar with pegging, I’d advise you to not Google that at work). Jeff Strand, an author who routinely pens horror stories with a comedic bent, presents one of the most seriously uncomfortable stories about a man who thinks he’s funny but isn’t. His story, “Parody,” is a painful read, akin to watching a highway pile-up in slow motion, as Zany Chester tries to take over the Shantyman’s stage and out-do “Weird Al” Yankovic with disastrous, decidedly not zany, results.
Disaster and the Shantyman, unfortunately, go hand in hand. Throughout, characters suffer disasters big and small, personal and otherworldly. Rolfe gives us an encounter with evil in “Master of Beyond,” as a few employees use their time off to play with Ouija board, which is, of course, always the best idea ever. Skipp’s “In the Winter of No Love” is a fantastically written tale of love, drugs, and rock and roll in the waning days of the 1960’s sexual revolution. “Open Mic Night” by Kelli Owen touches on my favorite music topics in her exploration of the 27 Club. The Shantyman is home to curses and cures, oftentimes more one than the other, and sometimes those forces are inextricably entwined as Matt Hayward demonstrates in his “Dark Stage,” as the Shantyman’s sound engineer is forced to retire from his crippling arthritis.
Over the course of Welcome to the Show, these authors explore the past, present, and future of the Shantyman. Some do their own thing, others build on the works they share space with, but throughout there exists a clear continuity that gives the Shantyman a sense of realness, a sense of history, a depth of existence. Brian Keene encapsulates this beautifully in the final moments of his short story, “Running Free,” about a mobster who finds out he has cancer and takes up running, hoping he’ll die of a heart attack instead. Even after mankind’s experiments with sound and vibrations have accidentally ripped open holes to other dimensions and music has been outlawed, the Shantyman still stands and draws in – or perhaps lures is more apt – those seeking the soulful connection and magic of music. Mary SanGiovanni takes us into the dive bar’s near future in “We Sang in Darkness,” a story that showcases her strong talents as a Lovecraftian writer.
The Shantyman is real. It exists, because it has been given life by the authors here. Each have conspired to erect this portal through space and time, and they’ve opened its doors for all to enter, particularly – especially – the unwary and the uncertain. Visiting the Shantyman, you’ll find that this establishment’s acts are at their best when they quietly sneak up on you and surprise, as Adam Cesare does in “The Southern Thing.” As an idea, the Shantyman is certainly one that feels fresh, unique, and wholly welcome, the kind of idea that has so much potential you can’t help but want more. I certainly hope the Shantyman’s doors haven’t been closed quite yet. I’d like to enjoy a few more shows still, and there are a few particular performers I’d love to see showcased in a return engagement. Maybe one day, if the cosmos align just so. For those visiting the Shantyman for the first time, welcome, and enjoy the show.