Your home is safe. Your mind is not.

James Everington has a habit of misplacing your expectations. (along with T shirts, yeah it still hurts James) His previous collection, Falling Over, introduced a writer who prefers the unsettling angle, the quiet moment that turns strange. With Defensive Wounds, his second collection from Infinity Plus, he takes that instinct further. These stories do not simply sit on the page. They itch.

Everington enjoys hiding his real intentions inside mundane details. A phone call at 3am unravels reality. This is a horror short story collection that operates on its own terms, moving from the mosquito terror of “Across the Water” to the wintry paranoia of “Snow.” The author refuses to give you the same story twice. He gives you doppelgängers, growing woods, and home invasions that twist into ghost stories.

This is not a book for passive reading. Everington builds his Defensive Wounds narrative around the idea that the safest places—home, relationships, the mind, are the most vulnerable. He borrows the Gothic weight of M. R. James but filters it through modern anxieties like climate change and fractured identity. If you are looking for a weird fiction collection that feels alive, that changes shape when you look away, you have found it. Just do not expect to find your shirt where you left it.

Defensive Wounds by James Everington: A Collection That Changes You

A Horror Book Review by Ben Unsworth

New from James Everington is ‘Defensive Wounds’, his second collection after ‘Falling Over’ (available from Infinity Plus).

Everington’s fiction never wastes any time before amping up how angsty it can be, however with this collection it seems to be the overriding theme, despite how diverse and off-kilter some of the stories are; from the mosquito horror of ‘Across the Water’, which will leave you itching yourself and reaching for the carbolic soap until the small hours, to the wormy madness of ‘The Place Where It Always Rains’; or from the wintry paranoia of ‘Snow’, able to chill your blood with its disorientation and feline fury (and which, in my mind at least, is set in somewhere akin to Portmeirion), to the bizarre holiday anxiety of ‘Hooked’.

‘Defensive Wounds’ is for the most part composed of reprints of stories published everywhere from Chthonic Matter Press to Undertow Publications. Of the reprints, these were the ones which struck a chord with me most:

First up is ‘The Affair’, a deeply uncanny tale of a man who is having an affair with a doppelgänger of his wife. The premise alone is enough to disturb, and indeed some of the horror comes from simply the main character indulging his affair in spite of the morbid preposterousness of the scenario. However, beneath that there’s an edge as heartfelt as it is parasitic and the final twist in the tale plays off the “if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry” principle extremely well.

Next we have ‘The Sound of the Sea, Too Close’. To call this an eco-horror story seems a bit one-tone considering the Gothic sneaks into like ivy crawling up a drainpipe. It is an overriding theme of the work though, since Everington seems to traverse climate change issues and sea rising fluidly and without hesitation for your sanity. The pacing is a little odd, I grant you, but any connoisseurs of the genre will be able to see past this in seconds and unlock the story’s worrisome core, which you can’t help feel has only grown in prescience since its original publication.

The third reprint to really stand out was ‘A Short Walk Round the Woods’, the plot of which taps into that classic horror fixture of someone moving to a new area, only for a stranger to tell him a cryptic warning: in this case, it’s that the woods are growing. Underpinned by the main character’s weird personal tragedy, Everington doesn’t guide but rather thrust you into Machen-esque territory here, although the longer narrative allows a slow-burn element to gnaw away at you too.

As with the fiction of Stephen Volk or Gary McMahon, I’d be very surprised if some parental worry (or a similar, dominating angst) wasn’t the secret mastermind behind this narrative since in addition to the nasty simplicity of the plot there’s a strand of emotion born of pure dread. He makes the mundane almost electrically nightmarish, and one of the reasons it works so well is that it treads the boundaries of the metaphysical too. 

Anyone wanting an easier, pulpier read may find this too tricky to enter without sufficient preparation, but for those who aren’t content until the horror has embedded itself in your psyche like some avaricious squatter you’ll likely come away thinking this is the collection’s finest story overall.

Then there’s the titular story, ‘Defensive Wounds’, best summed up as a home invasion story gone cuckoo and infected by some strange ghostly yarn. Except not that at all? Everything here is undefinable to different degrees, with splintered memories and confused recollections delightfully ambiguous and ungraspable, and that’s why it ricochets around your mind so much after finishing it. As you reach the end, it practically invites you to read it again, and if you can stomach the madness a second time it’s worth your time given how much it changes on re-reading.

You’ll need a willingness to indulge in horrors which aren’t just unexplained but which stand there and laugh at rationality; but the pay-off is worth it. And the terror is real. Whether you’re following the narrative or not, your inevitable grimaces and cautious side eyes hold the story in place, even during the ending which itself has a separate kind of ‘It Follows’ (2014)-styled feverous logic.

There are three new-to-here stories sprinkled through the collection too.

‘The House of Late-Night Phone Calls’ is first to brand itself onto your brain and it does so with significant aplomb, manifesting in whatever strange purgatory exists inbetween an M. R. Jamesian drama and Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Ronnie and Amy are plagued by phone calls which always arrive at 3am, each call heralding a tragedy of some kind; if you’re imagining a happy-clappy tale at this point – how? – allow me to disabuse you of the notion. ‘Late-Night Phone Calls’ is by far the most miserable story here, and what is possibly lacks in the strait-lacedness of its plot it recovers with how singularly powerful it is. 

Second is ‘The Man Who Could See Only Ducks’, a tale far more metaphysical than you’re probably expecting. In fact, it’s almost a Federico Fellini short film. Don’t ask me to explain the plot as even after three reads I’m not sure I fully grasp it: the best I can do is say it’s about parapsychologist who has tested someone with pictures before asking them to enter a house to retrieve a book, with a strange consequences.

But the ineffability is surely the whole point; it must be read to be believed. It’s an experience, where for every moment of understanding there’s a stab of total cluelessness. Ever so slightly this disorientation works to the story’s disadvantage, given the plot doesn’t quite manage to evoke the horror I reckon Everington might’ve been striving for. However, I did like it, even if I’m not sure why. 

The third new story, the enigmatic ‘Lost’, continues this slight inscrutability, although here the focus is someone trying to find a nineteen year-old girl at a bus station where geography seems to be having a field day, all of which is being related by a panicked phone call to the girl’s mother. The emotion grounds this tale, every note of panic as audible as a foghorn going off right beside you, and above all else the one thing you can rely on Everington for here is his ability to compress a lot of chaos into a really short space of time.

While it may be one of the shortest entries here, the dialogue is nonetheless barbed despite its seemingly mundane exterior and the characters are infinitely believable as reality convulses around them. This actually vies for my favourite from the whole collection.

Ultimately, ‘Defensive Wounds’ is quite a difficult collection to stomach and if you like being able to blitz though a book and be subsumed by it then you may find this off-putting. Undoubtedly, the strangeness and almost schizophrenic narratives are where this collection shines but also where it becomes a minefield. On the other hand, read one story per night, for instance, and you’ll be led through whatever existentially-corrupted limbo Everington’s mind is composed of and end up somewhere totally different, and far more disconcerting, than you imagine. 

Defensive Wounds by James Everington

Defensive wounds: the cuts and scratches we suffer trying to ward off harm, to fend off doom if only for a last moment…

Defensive Wounds & Other Stories brings together 17 haunting and haunted stories from author James Everington. In these tales you’ll find monstrous insects, strange men in the woods, visions born of heatstroke and heartache, and a very strange love affair indeed.

And you’ll find characters who, in their attempts to deny death and loss and despair, suffer the wounds of doing so, even as their efforts ultimately prove futile.

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