The Poorly Made And Other Things by Sam Rebelein

Review by Mata Haggis-Burridge

The Poorly Made And Other Things, by Sam Rebelein

Review by Mata Haggis-Burridge

Let’s start with a little certainty: this is a great book. The prose is visceral, the ideas bubble in bizarre ways, and the sense of location is superb. Lovers of dark, weird supernatural horror should absolutely read it.

With the simple bit out of the way, everything else about The Poorly Made And Other Things is more complicated.

What is this book? It’s certainly horror, there’s no doubt about that, but on a structural level it’s harder to place. 

Sam Rebelein latest is arguably a collection of short stories. There are distinct chapters with titles and characters that don’t repeat. But it’s also not only a collection of short stories. 

It is, perhaps, a themed anthology, where each story is disjointed but addressing a similar motif, where linking pin is the geographic region: Renfield Country. But there are occasional overlaps, such as references to pieces of cursed blood-stained wood, which pull each chapter together under the same umbrella and suggest a deeper undercurrent. It is more unified than an anthology.

If we want to be fancy, we could say it’s portmanteau storytelling, where each individual story builds to a singular narrative. But The Poorly Made doesn’t quite do anything so friendly as tying neatly together.

Sam Rebelain gives us ten radically different stories, and between each story we have emails from a sister to her brother, telling us about a curse on Renfield County that stemmed from a mass murder. These deaths had ritualistic elements, suggesting something older than the town had demanded a sacrifice.

As with all rituals, it appeared something was being asked for in return, but almost everything beyond the physical facts of that day are lost. What is known is that the wood of the barn where the final brutal slaying happened, covered in blood, was repurposed across Renfield County. The blood seeped into the water and the soil and the buildings and so, inevitably, into the minds of residents. In the emails, we get glimpses of the madness, and there are off-hand remarks about the stained wood in the background of the ten short stories.

What we get, as readers, is a very creepy collage. Each story is a piece making up the portrait of Renfield County. They’re all unique in how they manifest the uncanny, but together they form their own picture. It’s all a bit Frankensteinian, where the email chapters act as the stitching holding the monster together.

As with most short story collections, some sections are stronger than others. ‘Allison’s Face’ appears to be going towards a very queasy torture story, but ends in something bizarre and entirely more interesting, where ‘And Every Thursday We Feed The Cats’ is well-told but one of the few predictable sections of the book. The chatty language of ‘So My Cousin Knew This Guy’ might rub you up the wrong way, but personally I liked it. In ‘Glitch’, we get a very extended madness-driven section of self-mutilation which lets Rebelein’s mastery of visceral description shine. I suspect you’ll have your own preferences, depending on which fear strikes your gong.

Sam Rebelain is a great horror writer. Every horror writer will have faced the problem of how to describe the sensation of a shiver running down a spine without using the same phrasing as a thousand writers before. It is here, in finding unusual and potent ways of describing sensations, that Rebelein excels. While The Poorly Made didn’t quite turn my stomach like the ending of Poppy Z Brite’s Exquisite Corpse, I’ll still put The Poorly Made in second place on a very short list of books that genuinely got a physical reaction from me. 

Knowledge of Sam Rebelain’s previous book, Edenville, isn’t necessary. I’ve not read it myself yet. The Poorly Made starts with a map of Renfield County and the town of Edenville is in right in the middle, so I assume there are probably some references that have slipped by me, but I still had a great time with The Poorly Made, so don’t be worried about jumping in here.

For people who like to think about their stories on a deeper level, The Poorly Made gives us a lot to chew on. We’re not explicitly into ‘building on a native American burial ground’ territory, but there’s a distinct sense that the settlers of Renfield County made homes on land that had existing tenants, albeit supernatural things rather than the native nations.

Some stories veer towards the bizzarro genre, but more commonly The Poorly Made aligns with folk horror and modern urban myths, which in themselves talk about modern anxieties and mental health issues. Rebelein’s short stories refuse to explain the source of their darkness, leaving an aching sense of underlying forces at play and touch on how powerless we can feel against these. If that’s not a portrait of twenty-first century living, I don’t know what is.

The Poorly Made And Other Things is a novel, it’s an anthology, it’s a collection of fever dreams, and it’s psychogeography of a place that doesn’t exist. It’s definitely horror, but that’s one of the few definitive things to be said; after that, you just need to read it yourself.

The Poorly Made And Other Things, by Sam Rebelain

Return to the world of Renfield County from the Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of Edenville. Perfect for fans of Paul Tremblay and Eric LaRocca

“You remember all the stories, right? Monsters and giants and kid-eaters and that guy in the tub? Of course you do…”

There’s something wrong in Renfield County. It’s in the walls of the county’s historic houses, in the water, in the soil. But far worse than that—it’s embedded deep within everyone who lives here. From the detective desperate to avoid hurting his own family; to the man so consumed with feeling zen that he will pursue horrific, life-changing surgery to achieve it. From the townspeople taken by ancient, unknowable forces; to those who find themselves lost in the woods, pursued by the beasts who lurk within the trees.

Yes, there’s something very wrong in Renfield County—something that has been very wrong for a very long time. Something that is watching.

Something that is hungry.

From the mind of acclaimed author Sam Rebelein, return to the Bram Stoker Award-nominated world of Edenville in this interconnected series of short stories, and discover the true secrets of Renfield County.