"The Beast You Are" by Paul Tremblay

An audio book.

• Haunted House Tour: 1 Per Person - The persona Paul (husband of Katherine, father of Izzy) has a cardboard box of his old possessions dumped on him by his mother. He recalls fancying Kelly in his early teens. She gave people tours of her 1700s haunted house where Mrs Black once put her husband in an oven. He was 12, infatuated, when she showed him around. She had a story for each room. She said she dreamed of a ghost that was maybe her, part of her. He freaked out, thinking her grand-father was a ghost, and blew his chance with her. He sneaked off with a drawing she'd done of a ghost. He didn't talk to her again. He was lonely at school. He hears footsteps above (like he heard so many years ago in her house). (I liked this, though it felt like a missed oportunity)
• Mean Time - R, a wierdo, chalks on the pavement. One day the narrator wipes the marks away (it happens each night anyway?)
• I know you're there - David was dead for hours while Silas was in the house. Silas had seen the body in different positions though it was a corpse by then. Later he thinks he's being haunted by David, but whenever he turns, nothing's there.
• The Postal Zone - The Possession Edition - readers comments concerning a review in FanGoria of a BluRay release of a 15 years old reality show about a family. (I like it - lots of ideas.)
• Red Eyes - Monsters come to take Mary. They return. Somone has red eyes - did they always? I don't get it.
• The blog at the end of the world - Someone blogs that a friend has died. They get replies from various people, including nutters. Perhaps the dead friend is patient zero of an epidemic of cerebral aneurisms. Some people panic.
• Them: a pitch - a writer's written a script for a comic. I don't get it.
• House of Windows - Beside the library where Brian works, a new door-less house appears. Everybody is puzzled. It slowly grows. Other houses appears. A curious person dies.
• The Last Conversation - He is blind, mostly paralysed, without memories. A female helps him recover remotely. They used to live together. There's an epidemic. Nobody else is around. She shows him videos of herself from a baby to when they were together. She takes him to their house. When he sees himself in a mirror he's not who he was in the videos. She admits that he was a "clear" and she was training him to be her husband. She asks him to let him be cloned (she has her husband's dead body?). He says no. She says that all the previous ones have also said no. At the end he is blind, mostly paralysed, without memories.
• Mostly thighs (?!) - A giant monster smashes the town up. At the end a boy writes a poem
• The Large man - Mr C is one of 371 problems solvers. He has to discover who is killing the children of his bosses. He discovers that the culprit is 8ft tall. Not a man, an assemblage of rats. Not rats, but masses of ants.
• The Dead Thing - Owen, brother of the female narrator, has something in a shoebox under his bed. The shoebox is growing.
• Howard Sturgess ... - A 68 year old teacher is sent letters by someone belonging to "circa", about supercars etc. They come to his house. He hides.
• The Party - No.
• The Beast You Are - A 200 page novella. The characters are animals. The setting has cable TVs and universities. There are cycles of ages, and a monster that turns up at the end of each 1st age to take a child away. There's a serial murderer. I gave up.

There are story notes at the end - about the inspiration for the stories, etc.

Other reviews

• Tony Jones (many of the stories featured here are very short flash fiction pieces, quite experimental in nature and vary wildly in quality ... to casual readers some will come across as self-indulgent or in the case of Red Eyes or The Postal Zone: The Possession Edition make limited impact unless you have not read his novel A Head Full of Ghosts ... Ice Cold Lemonade 25c Haunted House Tour: 1 Per Person ... was a terrific tale, the sort of thing Tremblay does best, balancing ambiguity, childhood nostalgia, longing for a cute girl, whilst reflecting back on a childhood memory which resurfaces after many years. ... The Beast You Are [is] a real damp squid and a serious trudge to finish)
• John MW Thompson (several stories here are variations on or stories told within his novels)