Cut Costs Not Corners

What lies beneath the everyday moments we take for granted? In Cut Corners: Volume One, three masters of horror—Ramsey Campbell, Bentley Little, and Ray Garton—invite you to peer into the unsettling shadows cast by ordinary life. The collection’s premise is deceptively simple: three stories, each rooted in familiar environments, become corridors into nightmare. Yet, beneath that simplicity runs a deeper current about human fear, moral decay, and the grotesque transformations of modern existence.

The book brings together three distinct voices, each exploring a different aspect of horror grounded in reality. Campbell’s “The Address” turns a grandfather’s Sunday stroll into a descent into eerie, existential terror. Little’s “Conversation Between Two Women Overheard at My Dentist’s Office” uses a mundane chat to expose a grotesque undercurrent of violence lurking behind polite society. Garton’s “Autophagy” transforms body horror and dystopia into an allegory for societal breakdown and self-destruction. Together, these tales reveal that horror isn’t just something that happens in dark, distant places—it festers within our routines, our conversations, our own skins.

The Shared Premise: Ordinary Worlds Turn Predatory

Each story begins in a setting that’s almost tediously normal. A man takes a walk in the woods, two women gossip at the dentist, a software engineer struggles with personal and political stress. But as the pages turn, the world gently, then violently, mutates. Ramsey Campbell builds creeping dread through disorientation—his protagonist Fraith gets lost in a forest that becomes an allegorical labyrinth of decay and guilt. Bentley Little’s dialogue-driven piece strips away small talk’s civility to reveal shocking barbarity. Ray Garton takes things further, depicting a futuristic America where repression, surveillance, and parasitic horrors blur the line between societal and physical collapse.

Thematic Web: Guilt, Disconnection, and Corruption

At their core, the stories share a fascination with moral blindness. Fraith hides emotional neglect behind his good intentions; the women chatting at the dentist casually discuss homicide as if it were gossip; Garton’s narrator dissociates from national collapse and physical corruption alike. The common thread is denial—a refusal to acknowledge the rot beneath civility. Each story explores what happens when that denial shatters. You can’t read these tales without reflecting on how easily your own realities—routine paths, casual conversations, bodily certainties—might harbor unseen monstrosities.

Why These Horrors Matter

Unlike conventional horror anthologies, Cut Corners doesn’t depend on external monsters. Its fear arises from internal and systemic breakdowns—aging, alienation, violence normalized by conversation, and authoritarian decay. As a reader, you’re urged to see horror not as escape but as revelation. Each author asks: what if the true nightmare is simply realizing what’s always been there? Campbell’s labyrinthine woods mirror cognitive disintegration; Little’s dialogue unmasks moral numbness; Garton’s bio-political dystopia mirrors a nation consuming itself.

These stories work as both entertainment and warning. They whisper that you can no longer trust the familiar—the path home, the friendly chat, the safety of your own body. Much like Shirley Jackson, Clive Barker, or H.P. Lovecraft (in his psychological moments), these writers compel you to confront what society disguises. You’ll finish this volume uneasy, not only because of the terrors depicted but because you’ll recognize pieces of them in your own world. The true horror, after all, is how familiar it all feels.

Ramsey Campbell’s story “The Address” is a haunting study of confusion, memory, and the sinister nature of nostalgia. It follows Fraith, an elderly man who takes a solitary walk after deciding his daughter and granddaughters need a break from his company. His simple outing devolves into a nightmarish odyssey when he loses his way in a shadowed forest and stumbles upon an old school that shouldn’t exist. Campbell transforms a grandfather’s loneliness into a cosmic horror experience that feels both pitiable and inevitable.

The Dread of Familiar Ruins

Campbell is masterful in creating fear through atmosphere and misdirection. The deeper Fraith ventures into the woods, the less reality behaves. Signs vanish, paths repeat, and voices echo with distorted logic. His encounter with children, strangers, and local landscapes evokes the senility of age—a reality collapsing inward. When Fraith finds the “school,” which becomes the story’s grotesque centerpiece, memory and material world fuse into one monstrous metaphor. He realizes he is surrounded by the undead remnants of a school reunion gone feral—specters driven by revenge against teachers and adults who once controlled them. By then, Fraith’s attempt to reason his way out reflects every human’s futile effort to escape the looping forest of their own past mistakes.

Decay, Guilt, and the Horror of Memory

Campbell’s strength lies not in what’s seen but in what’s remembered. Fraith represents generational guilt—his attempts to help his family mirror his need for relevance, yet his disconnection reveals emotional atrophy. The forest becomes his psychological landscape: tangled, cyclical, oblivious to his will. The decayed school, still performing its “sports day” with grotesque ritual, enacts the macabre continuation of childhood cruelties. Campbell suggests that when we repress the pain of youth and aging, it festers until it consumes us. Similar to M. R. James’s haunted academics or Robert Aickman’s ambiguous supernaturalism, “The Address” insists that horror is less about death than about recognition—realizing you’ve been walking toward your own undoing all along.

If you’ve ever tuned out two people chatting at a waiting room, Bentley Little’s “Conversation Between Two Women Overheard at My Dentist’s Office” will ensure you never do again. Presented entirely as a dialogue, it begins like harmless gossip. Two women exchange pleasantries about their dental visits and fitness routines. Within pages, their talk takes a shocking descent into depravity—revealing the second woman’s calm description of murdering a would-be harasser during a jog. The format’s simplicity masks a brilliantly executed social satire on normalization of violence.

The Horror of Tone: Banality Meets Brutality

The genius of Little’s story lies in the contrast between tone and content. The women’s voices never shift; they remain polite, conversational, detached—even as one narrates crushing a man’s face with a rock and kicking his mutilated corpse. There’s no suspense, no confession arc, only the terrifying chill of casualness. The horror doesn’t stem solely from murder—it comes from how easily moral limits dissolve in daily talk. Like Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Little demonstrates how cultural desensitization makes atrocity sound like anecdote.

Gendered Violence and Complacency

Beneath its shock value, the story is an unsettling mirror of contemporary fears. Gender-based violence, voyeurism, and predation underpin the exchange—but so does the reciprocation of violence in equal absurdity. The line between vengeance and psychopathy blurs entirely. By the end, the women return to niceties—“Good luck with your tooth”—as if exorcising trauma through etiquette. Little seems to ask whether we’re all performing civility on the surface of chaos. You walk away feeling complicit, realizing how the story’s structure implicates you as eavesdropper and silent participant. It’s a psychological gut punch wrapped as idle chatter.

In the collection’s longest story, “Autophagy,” Ray Garton turns inward—literally. The narrator, a disillusioned IT worker in a collapsing America, discovers that “strange things have been coming out of his body lately.” As he navigates unemployment, political repression, and the crumbling marriage to Carly, Garton crafts an allegory of societal self-consumption. The term autophagy—scientifically meaning an organism consuming its own cells—becomes a symbol for both personal breakdown and collective apocalypse.

Physical Horror as Political Mirror

Garton sets his horror within a near-future America ruled by authoritarian conservatism. Reproductive laws criminalize abortion and premarital sex; therapy centers “cure” homosexuality. Against this backdrop, the narrator’s body begins spawning parasitic life forms that flee into his home’s walls. Fear of disease merges with fear of regime. As his affair with coworker Amber unfolds, he realizes she suffers the same fate—and that these creatures eventually devour her entirely. The body becomes a stage where oppression, repression, and guilt literally eat humanity alive.

Domestic Dystopia and Moral Disintegration

By mixing dystopian realism with visceral horror, Garton critiques societal complicity. The characters’ silence—about politics, extramarital affairs, physical horrors—embodies a nation too numbed to resist. The final image of the narrator returning home, fearing the same fate, closes the loop begun by Campbell’s and Little’s stories: the private sphere collapses inward, consuming itself. In a world that enforces purity yet rots within, Garton’s message is terrifyingly clear—eventually, the things we repress find their way out. Whether moral, political, or biological, self-devouring becomes inevitable.

One of the most striking unifiers across all three stories is their ability to warp ordinary moments into existential threats. A forest walk, a dentist’s chat, a sexual encounter—things you or I might do without notice—turn into revelations of rot. This technique, often called “domestic horror,” has roots in Shirley Jackson’s suburban nightmares and continues powerfully here. By targeting the predictable rhythms of daily life, these authors extract horror from what feels safe rather than strange.

Unreliable Reality

Campbell’s disorienting forest, Little’s minimalist transcript, and Garton’s body confessions all manipulate perception. You, the reader, share the protagonists’ bewilderment. The structure of each story mirrors its subject: Campbell’s looping geography, Little’s never-ending chatter, and Garton’s self-consuming flesh evoke cyclical deterioration. It’s a subtle reminder that the more we seek stability—clear paths, polite order, bodily control—the closer we approach decay.

Moral Message Hidden in the Macabre

Ultimately, Cut Corners challenges you to question complacency. Every polite simplification, every moral excuse, every ignored symptom contributes to collapse. Horror, in this sense, is a truth-telling device. It doesn’t invent monsters; it exposes them. The anthology’s title, “Cut Corners,” isn’t just a stylistic reference—it’s a warning about shortcuts: moral, emotional, or societal. In cutting corners, something vital gets lost, and what fills the gap is monstrous.