Six O’Clock House and Other Strange Tales
Rebecca Cuthbert
Watertower Hill Publishing (January 2025)
Reviewed by Nora B. Peevy
Rebecca Cuthbert has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Award. After reading this collection, I can see why. Six O’Clock House delivered a collection of quiet but creepy stories. A bunch of them filled with revenge and left me, as the reader feeling unsettled by the end of the tale. In “Joiner,” you will meet a waitress who becomes the victim of one of her regulars. In “Twist of Jack and Jill,” one of my personal favorites, Cuthbert turns the fairytale on its head with a lesbian romance. “Hey, Stranger” invites you to meet probably one of the most loveable ghosts I’ve ever met. And “Six O’Clock House” is a women’s revenge story.
The themes of this book are revenge and self-discovery when it’s too late to do anything to change your story. Ah, don’t both of things happen every day to people everywhere? That’s what makes this collection quietly chilling. I like Cuthbert’s finesse with words and plots that sneak up on you like a noose waiting for you in a dark hallway. Gentle horror is a talent slowly replaced for jump scares and blood and gore in today’s body of horror work, so it’s refreshing to see a writer following a more traditional approach.
