Three horror novellas that drag urban legends indoors and refuse to leave.
Urban legend horror lives in that queasy space where campfire stories crawl indoors and set up home. Dark Tide 20: Urban Legends gathers three horror novellas built on exactly that unease: one volume from Crystal Lake Publishing, three authors, and no filler padding out the running time. Leigh Kenny, Dan Franklin, and Nick Roberts each take the format and bend it their own way, so instead of the usual anthology fatigue you get room for three separate nightmares to dig in properly.
Kenny goes fast and cinematic with a haunted house that will not behave. Franklin writes a queasy tale of a new mother certain her baby is wrong, and does the female voice better than most men manage. Roberts closes the book with a podcast summoning gone spectacularly bad, pulpy and loud and revelling in its own bad taste. Not every story sits neatly inside the urban legend brief, and the finale runs hot enough that slow-burn readers may want to brace themselves. What holds the collection together is tone. Each novella ends somewhere frightening, and each takes an irrational fear and makes it feel like it happened in your own front room.
Dark Tide 20: Urban Legends | Crystal Lake Publishing | 09 May 2025 |
Three authors, three novellas, and enough room for specific nightmares to take root. The middle tale strays furthest from the urban legend brief and the finale runs at full throttle, but every story ends somewhere frightening. These are irrational horrors made familiar and intimate
Dark Tide 20: Urban Legends Review, Three Novellas Worth Reading
Before reading this, Leigh Kenny, Dan Franklin, and Nick Roberts were all unknowns to me, but as someone who’s partial to urban slant of traditionally suburban or rural tropes this was a nice introductory vehicle to all their work.
Urban legend is a genre that includes everything from apocryphal folklore to reflections of societal angst, including everything from the Dark Watchers of California to the ‘Paul McCartney is Dead’ conspiracy, and in recent years the vehicle for these has increasingly been the social media-altered variant. They’re campfire stories that happen to take place in the (dis)comfort of your own home, and frequently the answer is some flirtatious hybrid of pseudo-science and fantasy to the extent that you’re left classifying it as a supernatural horror story simply to give your mind an easy time of it.
The specific set-up of ‘Dark Tide 20’ is fairly simple: three novellas, each exploring the concept. And unlike anthologies on a single theme, where sometimes by the seventeenth vampire story you’re gasping for a change of page, the focus on only three authors and longer stories really allows for specific nightmares to take root.
Without much further ado then!
First up is Leigh Kenny’s ‘Knock on Wood’, which is arguably the slightest of the three stories here, but also maybe the punchiest. The slice of urban legend explored here is the ramifications of a child’s nightmare in a supposedly-haunted house.
As the shortest of the three novellas, its brevity doesn’t give you much time to consider actually how direct or almost cinematic Kenny’s effort is, barrelling through creature feature vignettes of a kind like some private vendetta is being enacted. The chapters are constructed almost like a film instead of a book, quick and stychomythic and where you can practically hear you yelling someone demanding they cut to the next shot, however this will appease to any devotees of Stephen King’s short story ‘The Boogeyman’ and Judith Sonnet ‘The Home’, to name but two.
However, the thinner haunted house plot stringing it all together is never just a way from getting from A to B, and Kenny ensures that if you aren’t grappling with this story’s devilish limbs you’re focusing on its eerie connective tissue instead. Plus, even if the creature feature element is arguably like the set piece structure of many a schlocky 70s production, it’s so exuberant that it’s hard to criticise. Additionally, in its final few pages it hurtles down an almost Lovecraftian wormhole and ends up in an unremittingly grim place which, while not exactly frightening, has an unmistakably nasty punch to it.
Second is Dan Franklin’s ‘Nesting’, which even though it isn’t really a body horror, is written with the same kind of exacting, visceral style as many better examples of the subgenre. The plot is a little more impenetrable here; at the very least, it takes the tried-and-tested premise of someone questioning whether their baby has been swapped, and ensures the reality has actually started to slip away before you’ve even read the first word.
Hence, if you like your stories easily slotting into a tick-box this won’t be for you. But for anyone willing to throw themselves into a Weston Ochse-ish morass of paranoia, gaslighting, and sensory evils in every direction (a readership that most definitely includes me), it’s an excellent narrative.
The character work is especially noteworthy. Male-authored stories of a woman’s emotions set my teeth on edge because of how easily the male authors prove they don’t understand women at all, but this isn’t the case with Franklin. The woman at the heart of this story has a clear and strong voice, and around her revolves a number of character all of whom are flawed. They wear you out and they amplify the psychological, intelligent horror immensely.
(For the record, other male authors who do the female voice well, to name a few: Nathan Ballingrud, Grady Hendrix, Ray Cluley, Aaron Dries, and Laird Barron.)
The third, and longest, of the novellas is Nick Roberts’s ‘Poltergeist Password’, best summarised as Danny Robbins’s ‘Uncanny’ meets Stephen Volk’s ‘Ghostwatch’.
Unlike the prior two, this one takes on an epistolary-slanted form and presents everything as the transcript of a podcast gone horribly wrong when the three hosts decide to summon up a poltergeist. This never hinders it though. By necessity, it disobeys the show-don’t-tell rule a little more often than most tales, however it’s gloriously OTT moments are just that.
By its conclusion, it’s the most full throttle of the narratives, and anyone familiar with Roberts’s work will be accustomed to make a tepid event or quite a standard trope somehow still land your jaw on the floor given the brand of madness he galvanises. As such, this isn’t exactly a divergent or revolutionary take on the subject material and you can likely tell what the next page will hold. What sets it apart is how pulpy it feels, craving for you to be disgusted, the route it takes revelling in its own bizarre repulsiveness like those of any number of Thomas Ligotti novels do.
Ultimately, this is an excellent trio of horrors. The middle is the most tenuously connected to the ‘Urban Legend’ brief and if you like your stories more slow-burning than high octane the final entry might not be totally for you; however, a lot of passages manage to be really suspenseful, and the note each ends on is always a frightening one. These are irrational horrors made all too familiar and intimate.
Urban Legends: Three New Tales of Terror (Dark Tide Horror Novellas Book 20)
Enter the world of terrifying urban legends where the lines between myth and reality blur into a nightmare of unexplainable horrors. In this spine-chilling volume, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and familiar fears are taken to unimaginable heights.
Features a foreword by Adam Cesare, the author of Clown in a Cornfield (now a feature film).
“Nesting” by Dan Franklin: Amanda can’t shake the idea that her newborn baby isn’t hers…and maybe isn’t a baby at all.
Not even one full day postpartum, and Amanda can’t shake the certainty that the baby isn’t hers. The charts say he is, the nurses and doctor all agree, but in her heart she can’t help but know better. His hair is wrong. He doesn’t quite smell right…and he has a tooth.
“Knock on Wood” by Leigh Kenny: If he knocks, it’s too late. He’s already inside.
The house on Hawthorne Avenue has an unfortunate past. The adults think it’s just bad luck. The kids believe it’s something worse.
Sometimes truth is scarier than legend.
“Poltergeist Password” by Nick Roberts: “Have you heard of Poltergeist Password?”
A reporter presents the unedited transcript of the final episode of the Broadcasts from the Grave podcast in which three hosts test an urban legend known as “Poltergeist Password.” Whether it’s real or an elaborate hoax, three people remain missing. You be the judge.
Dark Tide 20 takes you on a terrifying journey through some of the most unsettling myths and folklore, where terror lurks in the shadows and urban legends come alive in the most horrific ways. Prepare for twists, fear, and truths you may not want to know.
Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing—Where Stories Come Alive!
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