If you enjoy the short stories of Jack Ketchum, you'll get a kick out of this collection from Brett Alexander Savory.

No Further Messages continues a string of strong short story collections I've had the pleasure of reading over the past year, with Brett Alexander Savory delivering 20 hard-hitting pieces of fiction that run the gamut from emotional to downright rabidly nasty.

Things start with all the gentleness of a knife to the belly (literally!) with 'Messages,' a story about two teams of assassins doing their best to either protect or kill writers who seem to be channeling messages from God.

'Scenario B,' shifts gears, and ably blends violence with compassion. You'll feel for the main character, who at first seems like a monster but is later revealed to be a victim of unfortunate circumstances. An homage to the Frankenstein mythos, this story carries as strong an emotional punch as does the following tale, 'Apology,' but the two stories couldn't be further apart. One veers towards compassion, while the other is just a visceral kick in the balls.

Some other really strong stories are 'Jewels,' 'Water-Song,' 'Danny Boy,' and 'Silica.'

The majority of the tales in this collection deal with human-human interactions, rather than supernatural occurrences: murder, personal violence, insanity, and torture fill page after page. A lot of them teeter on the edge of splatter or extreme violent horror, but they never fall over into the abyss, somehow managing to give us a close-up view of all this carved flesh and mental illness without grossing out the reader. In this respect, Savory has managed to do, for the most part, what Jack Ketchum does so well in his short stories - write with an unrelenting hardness that somehow never turns the reader off.

As with any collection, not every story is a home run; 'Slip Knot,' 'The Collective,' and 'Jimmy Dale' didn't really grab me the way some of the others did. A few stories were a bit too surreal for me. But there are plenty of readers who enjoy that sort of thing, and even when Savory isn't at the top of his game plot-wise, his crisp, clean style of writing, with no wasted words, keeps you reading to the end.

My one real complaint about this book is that it was just too damn short. The whole thing is only 215 pages, and some of the stories are only 2-3 pages in length.

However, the short length of most of the stories makes this an excellent book to keep with you to read in those random moments of personal down time. I carried it to the doctor's office and had it with me while I waited at the veterinarian's office. I finished it one evening while my wife was in the shower.

In the end, though, no matter where or when you read No Further Messages, you won't be disappointed.



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JG Faherty is a writer of dark fiction. His most recent credits include Cemetery Dance #58, MagusZine, All Possible Worlds, and the Garden State Horror Writers' 2007 anthology, Dark Territories. He was the inaugural Fiction Editor at Doorways Magazine, and writes regular columns, book reviews, and interviews for the Horror Writers Association newsletter, FearZone, and several other online and print venues. You can visit him at www.jgfaherty.com.