What’s Coming for You by Joshua Rex | Book Review

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

In these ten unsettling tales—the debut collection from Joshua Rex—cities and houses become predators, mothers macabre curators, dormant antique coats and colonial legends revivified dangers. A psychometress resurrects a rapacious fiend, and a psychologist counsels an eerily familiar patient. A man returning home to bury his father is forced to exhume a horrid secret, and a bullied adolescent’s game-winning shot is not only a team victory but a bloody and visceral personal triumph.

Uniting these doomed is the unequivocal certainty that what is coming is coming for us all.

Includes: The Leap. Breakout Season. The Unfinished Room. What’s Coming for You. A Mother’s Museum. Coattails. The Whispering Wheel. The Reveal. In Situ. The Voice Below.

What’s Coming for You epitomises the things that go bump in the night.  It’s that creeping chill down a spine, a spiralling sense of unease but they are so addictive that you just have to keep reading, you need to know what shocks and horrors await you.  I’ve found that horror short story collections can be either hit or miss.  There’s going to be stories you love and some that you don’t like as much.  I was pleasantly surprised Joshua Rex’ super creepy tales of puberty gone wrong, the dead calling out and items of clothing sucking the life out of its wearer. 

A gasp, a break, eyes bulging outward.  These are all emotions that this compilation made me emit.  This is just what I love about this genre.  Even if you think you’ve seen and read it all, there is going to be something that will be like a bolt out of the blue – there is always room for surprise and shock, and I love it when it happens.  My eyes were the driving force and I struggled to keep up with them – they wanted to consume faster than I could read!  The pace, the addiction and the fear were a propulsive concoction that inevitably meant this would be a compulsive read.

I want to go ahead and talk about some of my favourite stories contained within What’s Coming for You.  So, grab a cuppa and be prepared for the terror.

Breakout Season is about an awkward teenage boy who quite frankly is struggling with his place in both the world and society.  He’s the weird boy in school, he doesn’t know how to act, and others don’t know how to react around him.  He’s a target…he shouldn’t be, we are all different and should be accepted as such but apparently that isn’t how the world goes round.  It’s the breakout basketball game and the boy is brought out in the final moments.  He has a raw skill but as it also turns out he has skill in raw horror also.  His mutilated form commits such atrocious acts that the spectators must witness.  Rex really lays the easter eggs in this story, we get insight into his ability to instantly disarm his reader with one paragraph.

The Unfinished Room also was a devishily frightening tale that had me hyperventilating but also checking over my shoulder.  The author has combined everything that a parent fears and transformed it into a walking nightmare.  Rex uses the pretext of houses being rooted within our brains of a place that can possess the most fear.  They are meant to shelter and protect us the author uses them emit suspicion, paranoia and even at times madness.  

What’s Coming for You is a collection of excellent stories and readers should expect horrifying payoff and the end of each subsequent story.  There is the running hidden meaning through each story of What’s Coming for You…Be prepared for a Tales From the Crypt vibe and I was completely here for it!

ABOUT JOSHUA REX

JOSHUA REX (b. 1980) is an American author of speculative fiction. He was born in Sandusky, Ohio and grew up between the Midwest and New England. He studied History at Bowling Green State University (B.A. 2005), and Culinary Arts at Johnson and Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island (A.S. 2000). His debut horror collection What’s Coming for You was released in August, 2020. He lives in El Paso, Texas.

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