Acquired Taste

This guy.

This fucking guy.

Let me back up: one of the weird little habits you pick up when you start reviewing books is that you find yourself constructing that review on the fly, in real-time, whilst reading. When you're 100 page into a new read (or even less), you find yourself asking yourself "what do I think of this book?", "how am I going to describe it?"... "how will I write about this?".

Or at least I do.

Often it's clearcut. In fact, I find (and I suspect this is true for other amateur reviewers and fans out there too) that if I'm enjoying a book enough in the first half, I may even develop blind-spots for things that would normally annoy me. My inner critic will absolutely STFU if I'm being pulled along sufficiently by the story and I'm having a blast. This may be a sign that I shouldn't really, y'know, try to review books in the first place. But anyway, that whole debate is for another post.

The point I'm circumventing here is I find this book incredibly difficult to rate or describe. I went through a lot of feelings whilst reading this collection of short stories. It's beyond a cliche by this point to when reviewing short story collections to comment that they're "a mixed bag": some stories land, some don't, que sera sera. Personally I find that this isn't often true for me. I love short stories and I've actively tried to increase the amount I read. (Finishing this book took me up to 250 short stories for this year so far, so I don't think I'm doing too badly here, but that's an aside). I can normally find something to love about most short story collections, even if I enjoy some much more than others.

And I thought the same was true for Acquired Taste. A few stories in, I thought I had the measure of this book. Clay McLeod Chapman loves many things: dialing things up to 11; wacky - even campy - humour;  being gross; and alliteration to name a few.  But I wasn't sure if I personally enjoyed his style or not, if he was for me. I can definitely see the appeal here and would recommend him to other readers, but I'd more or less come to conclude that he wasn't quite for me.

I enjoyed Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, And Key, in which a moralising pastor enlists the local scout group to collect and burn the town's stash of lurid horror comics, before having the tables turned on him. The Spew of the News was a fine railing against the corruptive influence of TV news bias, as the narrator's boomer parents become unrecognisable to him. This story more or less revisited the author's 2025 novel Wake Up and Open Your Eyes. In Room with a Boo, we meet a single woman isolating during the Covid pandemic alone, until she realises that she already has a ghostly cohabitant. Pump and Dump may have been the point where I started to doubt if this writer is for me: a questionable haunted object story where the object in question is a breast pump. At this point admit I started flicking through to see how many stories were left in the collection.

But then came the razor-sharp Pick of the Litter, a flash fiction piece which hinges on a wonderfully dark twist. The immediacy of this story alone made me sit up and pay attention and the second half of this collection was more effective for me.

In Knockoffs, the toner veers quickly from OTT silliness to something very dark. The Nocturnal Gardener is bittersweet, and made me forget that a few 100 pages back, I'd been reading about a haunted breast pump. For me, the two standout stories here were Hermit and Stay On The Line, both of which were highly emotive and haunting pieces of fiction.

Clay McLeod Chapman's range here is impressive. He riffs on social media, the US civil war and, perhaps more than anything else, family. I was struck by how often fatherhood was central to the stories here. This may sound fairly run-of-the-mill but I don't think it's something that's very popular in horror right now, so I was pleased to find it here in spades. Clay's characters are dads getting their house ready for a baby; confused dads who can't keep up with the latest toy craze from Youtube; dads coming to terms with their last night of trick or treating before their child ages out of the tradition. There's so much paternal love here in amongst all the off-the-wall horror and it was genuinely touching.

The collection ends with Nathan Ballingrud's Haunting Horror Recs, in which two fans track down the elusive writer after hearing that he works in a local bookstore.  I loved this story, but I think other readers' mileage with depend very much on how much of a horror fiction nerd they are, since this felt a bit like an extended inside joke.

There's a lot to love in this collection and it truly earns its title Acquired Taste. This isn't a book that I'd rush to push into the hands of every horror reader: I firmly believe that one is still to come, and I'll be waiting eagerly to read Chapman's masterpiece when it does.

Thank you to Titan Books and Netgalley for my digital ARC.