Why ‘Six Stories’ is a Must-Read for Horror Fans

Why ‘Six Stories’ is a Must-Read for Horror Fans

Introduction

The Northern Weird Project

Throughout 2025, Wild Hunt Books will publish six fantastic pocket-sized novellas from authors based in the North of England and who are also engaging with the North as setting, subject and character.

The novellas incorporate eerie and uncanny incidents including a strange occurrence on a train, a young boy’s disappearance in a village, a grieving couple renovating a haunted house, a group of mysterious strangers by the beach, a sinister wellness retreat and the unearthed danger beneath an ancient peat bog.

Editor Ariell Cacciola said of the project, ‘Im so excited about this project. The novellas will transport readers into the strange and dangerous corners of the North, and it will be impossible not to read each book in one sitting.’ We have already reviewed This House Isn’t Haunted But We Are by Stephen Howard . And today Tony Jones reviews (Don’t) Call Mum by Matt Wesolowski, but that’s not all. We have also rescued a massive article from the archives of the dead Ginger Nuts of Horror Website from Tony Jones and Steve Stred, to celebrate the launch of (Don’t) Call Mum by Matt Wesolowski from Wild Hunt.

You can read Tony Jones’s review of (Don’t) Call Mum by Matt Wesolowski here

Tony Jones and Steve Stred rake over old bones and discuss the stunning ‘Six Stories’ series with author Matt Wesolowski

It takes a very special series of books to unite two top review sites for a ‘rare as hen’s teeth’ joint feature…. Ginger Nuts of Horror (Tony Jones) and Kendall Reviews (Steve Stred) join forces to rake over the bones of Matt Wesolowski’s superb Six Stories series, which began back in 2016, with book six Demon hitting the shelves earlier in 2022.

Both Tony and Steve review a lot of books and often share recommendations with each other, by sheer coincidence they started reading Six Stories at roughly the same time and in their regularly chats decided to join literary forces, as it became apparent they had jointly stumbled upon a series which was rather special.
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Even more exciting, the project got even more intriguing when the author of the Six Stories series Matt Wesolowski got involved and we feature a brand-new interview in which he answers some of our most pressing questions.

Background to the Six Stories series:

All six novels are written in the same style, are pure genius in their simplicity being the perfect blend of thriller and horror. True crime podcaster Scott King interviews six individuals who are in some way connected to an often-notorious cold case or murder whose discussions attempt to shed new light on the investigation. As the series has continued Scott’s podcast has grown in popularity and although the creator stays out of the spotlight media interest in him increases.

There is also often an undiagnosed supernatural feel to the cases, but because he is not necessary trying to ‘solve’ a murder or mystery there are often enticing threads left hanging and not all questions are necessary answered. For those of you enjoy your crime to be of the type of investigation Miss Marple might lead you may hate these books!

But if you enjoy darker explorations which take the side roads, dark ripples into broken psyches, the opinions of bit-players or avenues not covered by the police then these books will blow you away. Some very big names (especially crime writers) have endorsed the series, including Ian Rankin, Joseph Knox, Andrew Michael Hurley, Alex North, James Oswald, CJ Tudor and Michael Marshall Smith. To call them awesome is a serious understatement.

Before we introduce Matt Wesolowski, Tony and Steve rake over old bones…..

TONY to STEVE: What makes this series such a success for you?  Personally, I was blown away from start to finish, it started with a great first entry and it just got better and better.

STEVE: For me, I think it was the realism and the feeling that this was 100% factual. Everything was so cinematic and told with such vividness. It really was like watching a True Crime documentary. I would love to see Wesolowski’s research and plotting for these books. The number of times I’ve Googled something while reading the Six Stories to only find links to that specific book popup is insane!   

STEVE to TONY: Having read all six books now, I’ve a bit sad I didn’t discover them sooner. Can you recall a series like this where you were kicking yourself you didn’t get to them sooner in your reading life?

TONY: On the other hand, discovering them late allows for a great binge! Although I read a couple of John Connolly at random points over the last twenty years, I freshly ‘discovered’ the Charlie Parker novels over the first lockdown in 2020 and read all eighteen very close together. To be honest, when it comes to series I think more of fantasy and detective novels rather than horror, stuff like George RR Martin, Ian Rankin or Michael Connelly are authors I’ve followed for many years. There are always new writers to be discovered and Matt Wesolowski was my absolute major find of 2021.

TONY to STEVE: How well did you think the undiagnosed supernatural element worked? Although this is explained away in some of the threads, it did feature in all six books. I think Demon is the one with most unanswered questions and I also loved the way the series often took in local folklore and traditions peculiar to small areas.

STEVE: Personally, I did love the local folklore within, but it did frustrate me a bit. You’re right, Demon seemed to embrace the supernatural elements the most AND actually dive into them more than the other five did. The series reminded me a bit of the Animal Planet show ‘Finding Bigfoot.’ The researchers would spend a night in an area, have some sort of ‘event’ or ‘incident’ and instead of investigating it more, they’d move onto to another place. That’s actually why I stopped watching that show early on – too much unfilled elements. Wesolowski would tease it A LOT and but the story itself was always so powerful that I wanted to see how things played out.

TONY to STEVE: If Matt Wesolowski wanted to fiddle around with the format, perhaps in a bid to freshen things up what would your suggestions be? This is tricky as the familiarity of the recurring format is one of the great strengths of the series. I guess one suggestion would be finding out more about the podcaster Scott King himself, but we can ask Matt later!

STEVE: Yes, bingo! I think if anything, especially after the revelations in book 3 The Changeling, we could get an entire novel where Scott looks deeper into his own life but without the format. A pure novel of a man trying to find his place in the world when everything he thought he knew was incorrect. I also worry that this might alienate fans of the series though.

STEVE to TONY: On a side note – has Matt pigeonholed himself into this series? I’d be keen to see what he’d create outside of the Six Stories Series, but would people be up to embrace it you think? He does have a 2013 release called The Black Land out.

TONY: Yes, I’ve read it, The Black Land was written before Six Stories entry and is a much simplex piece of writing, which lacks the complexities which makes the series such a unique reading experience. It was published in 2013 and the first Six Stories appeared three years later, I would be very interested in hearing what Matt was up to, literary wise, over that period. I will be equally fascinated to hear what Matt does next, as he has been working with the same tried and tested format since 2016 and that has allowed him to release a book a year. Will he break away from that trusted format and write a straight thriller or horror novel?

TONY to STEVE: This is impossible to answer because the whole series is so strong, but how would you rank the series?  My list is in the left-hand column.

STEVE to TONY: It is interesting to see that the only one for us that we ranked the same was Demon out of the group. If you had to recommend just one of these books to a potential reader would it be Demon?

TONY: I would always insist reading them in order and there are no real weak points, more a matter of taste and I found them incredibly difficult to rank. None deserve to be last. But I might break rank and choose Changeling, that was a very clever plot and comes together so nicely and is a rock-solid example of how clever, sneaky and unpredictable the stories can be. On one level it was fiendishly simple: a kid disappears from a car, but where could he possibly have gone?

TONY to STEVE: Considering the number of books we read and review I think the Six Stories series is still flying under the radar in the horror community and I do not hear it name checked anywhere near as much as it deserves to. What do you think?

STEVE: Absolutely – and I think I’d chalk it up to a few things. The first – there is a very prominent “extreme” movement happening right now, especially on larger Facebook pages such as Books of Horror. Not saying that’s wrong or shouldn’t be happening, but these stories might be considered ‘tame’ for those fans of the Godless crowd.

Secondly – I think people might not be giving it as much of a chance as it should get because of the ‘crime’ element mixed with the ‘podcast’ element. As I mentioned to you prior to reading these and even to Gavin at Kendall Reviews – I believed these were a collection of unconnected stories initially. I didn’t get that it was a podcast where the entirety was connected through each release. So, when I discovered that it was a singular release with a singular storyline, I dove in and haven’t looked back since.

STEVE to TONY: do you have any thoughts on why that might be?

TONY: Completely agree with your comments. I think the thriller/crime market is much bigger than the horror slice and publisher might be directing the books more there. I don’t see Matt much on social media much either, these books could easily appeal to authors with big followings such as Adam Nevill, but he’s very busy online interacting with fans. Is there is such a thing as a Matt Wesolowski ‘brand’ I doubt it would be seen as horror.

I also noticed all the big names who have championed the series are predominately crime writers, but there are others who use similar supernatural overtones as himself, Alex North, James Oswald and CJ Tudor being three good examples. Finally, compared to crime and thrillers the number of series lasting six books in horror is miniscule and those other genres naturally lend themselves better to sequences.

TONY to STEVE: How excited do you get as each of the books as each case unfolded, particularly as we approached the final interviewee? I found myself almost wetting myself with excitement! I also found myself wishing so-and-so was interviewed only to find out they weren’t!

STEVE: Yes! Matt does a great job of doing a very sly bait and switch a number of times. In each release you ABSOLUTELY know what is going to happen and who will be interviewed in every single interview, only to have no idea when the next chapter starts and then once again you’re confident you know ABOSLUTELY everything and then you don’t and repeat! I will also add – I don’t think I was ever disappointed in how any of them ended.

STEVE to TONY: Did you find the conclusion to each satisfactory?

TONY: Yes, in their own way, but some I preferred more than others, but the logic was sound in all of them, which perhaps edged them towards the crime genre and away from horror. On a few occasions I was disappointed ‘so and so’ wasn’t interviewed, but for the final interview I was so on the hook for who it was! I deliberately skipped the contents pages in case I picked up unnecessary clues. I also loved the way that he refused to go bombastic and refused to drop huge plot twists and by keeping things low key ramped up the level of realism.

TONY to STEVE: Hit me with some reasons why readers should spend their hard-earned cash on Six Stories? I can give you one VERY big reason Steve, the absolute gold standard of combining crime and the supernatural is John Connolly’s Charlie Parker series, the Six Stories match these and I simply cannot give these books higher praise. The Parker books are definitely fuller on supernatural, but the threat always lurks in the back of Six Stories, whether it is explained away or not….

STEVE: I think for me – they were just so engrossing from start to finish. I shamefully haven’t read any of the Charlie Parker series, but for me, the gold standard of reading is purely – when I’m not reading that book am I constantly thinking about it? There have been very few series like this that simply don’t stutter or trip up or diminish in quality at some stage, but the Six Stories series doesn’t do that once.

And I think this is one of those series where you absolutely CAN NOT only reading one of them. I’ve seen a few people mention, as well, that they didn’t realize there was an “order” to the releases and started on Book two or Book four and then went back and read the other ones and that really speaks to the format and power of the storytelling that Wesolowski has delivered.

TONY: I have not got the patience for podcasts or audiobooks, but if true crime podcasts are anything like as riveting as Six Stories then I’m obviously missing a trick. These books are unique in that there is no weak link and if anything, the sum is greater than the parts. I kept on thinking the format would get boring or something, but it never did and I found the familiarity of the format comforting.

That perhaps also has similarities with crime fiction, when the reader quickly tunes into what their favourite detective is up to in the latest book. The word ‘masterpiece’ is bounded around all too easily, but the Six Stories ranks amongst the best things I have read in years. And I read A LOT!

Interview with Matt Wesolowski 

Now let us catch up with Matt Wesolowski with a few questions which have come out of our discussion.

TONY & STEVE: Book six ‘Demon’ hints that ‘Six Stories’ might have reached the end of the road, please say it is not so?

MATT: I can’t really say at the moment! It’s certainly possible, but it’s also possible that Scott King may return. I don’t want to push to write another one for the sake of it (I’ve had one a year out for the past 6 years) – Demon is perhaps the one I’m most proud of and writing it has taught me I need to wait until I really feel passionate about an idea before I start writing it.

TONY & STEVE: Do you think ‘Demon’ is the most overtly supernatural of the series?

Actually, I feel it’s the least supernatural of all of them! Demon is the one that I did the least supernatural research for anyway! I think a trope like Demon possession has been done so many ways and so much better that I can do. As much as I wanted to write a possession book, it turned out the ‘demonic’ aspect of the story is only really the surface.

Our society is very quick to label people (and, inexplicably CHILDREN) as ‘evil’ or ‘demonic’ before taking a moment to look at ourselves first and wonder what environment we’ve created where a child can commit a terrible act such as the pair in Demon. In many ways, our thinking around evil is still medieval.

TONY & STEVE: Do you have an interest in local folklore? It plays a significant part of a number of the books?

MATT: Very much so. I’ve always been fascinated by folk tales; as a child I read British Folk Tales by Kevin Crossley-Holland (1987) so many times, I could tell most of them off by heart – they’re adapted folk tales from various different parts of the British Isles and it taught me so much about folklore and the art of storytelling.

Folk tales and local lore has a huge part in forming societies – cautionary and moral stories, usually told orally hold huge power and it’s no wonder everywhere has their own tales of boggarts, selkies and strange creatures.  Where I live in the North East of England, we have an abundance of local lore, from the vicious ‘Duegar’ or ‘little people’ of the Simonside Hills to the monstrous Lambton Worm in County Durham. Whenever I go anywhere, I always try to find out about the local tales and legends.

TONY & STEVE: How strongly are the cases inspired by real life, I got a Michael Jackson vibe in ‘Deity’ and the Jamie Bulger murder in ‘Demon’?

MATT: Both. An amalgam of very real problems – Zach Crystal draws on elements of Jackson but also other predators such as Jimmy Saville and (allegedly) Marilyn Manson. It’s about looking up to someone who is almost god-like and feeling like we can excuse their predatory behaviour because of who they are but where we, as fans or consumers of their media or music are left in the aftermath of their downfall.

Demon probably lends itself more to general child-on-child violence and murder rather than a specific case. My work background is in working with permanently excluded and often violent young people and I wanted to draw out the idea that it’s possible to feel compassion for a child as well as condemn an horrific act. These are unpleasant, complicated feelings that are never black and white and it’s there where I feel the story lies. What’s most important to me is to create that conflict in the reader.

TONY & STEVE: Do you think the books would truly work if recorded as podcasts in that you could con listeners into thinking they were listening to a true crime podcast?

MATT: Oh, that would be so much fun! I’ve had people (my publisher and editor included) googling various characters and incidents to see if they’re real or not and I love the idea of blending reality and horror. I’m a huge fan of found footage horror but only when it’s done well like the first Blair Witch Project and BBC’s 1992 Ghostwatch which terrified my generation when it was broadcast and maybe that sowed the seed?

TONY & STEVE: If the series is to continue do you intend to reveal more about the mysterious podcaster Scott King?

MATT: I actually did in an earlier draft of Demon – in which a few disgruntled Zach Crystal fans were digging some dirt on him but sadly, those parts never saw the light of day. Now I’m thinking about it, I do like to keep him out of the limelight but the more series he records, I feel like the less places he has to hide!

TONY & STEVE: Has there been any interest in the series for film or television?

MATT: I actually sold the film rights very soon after the first Six Stories was published but I can’t say a lot about it other than these things take a great deal of time and usually end in disappointment! However, I should hopefully have something exciting to share soon…

TONY & STEVE: Do you listen to true crime podcasts? If so what do you recommend?

MATT: Not as much as I used to these days, I’m much more interested in listening to horror stories; Radio Rental being a particular current favourite. Who knows if the stories on there are true or not – I think that’s what I like about it! I still listen to Casefile – an Australian true crime podcast whose host as anonymous and has certainly influenced the Six Stories series. I feel like the first series of Serial is pretty untouchable and still holds up today. Truth and Justice with Bob Ruff is astounding in terms of research and depth; the episodes about the West Memphis Three are amazing.

TONY & STEVE: There has been a lot of discussion of whether the books are horror, crime or both. How do you see it and your audience?

MATT: I think it’s a pretty even split. Horror has been such a significant part of my life ever since I was very young; The Usbourne World of the Unknown: Monsters, UFOs and Ghosts books were basically my bibles growing up and I do read a lot of true crime so it’s only natural the two should meet! I know that sometimes publishers and booksellers have a hard time knowing exactly which shelves my books should be stacked on, but I just concentrate on writing the sort of stories I like to read.

This year the difference is that I’ve been booked to appear on panels at some sci-fi/speculative festivals as well as crime (Crimefest, Theakstons, Cymera, Capital Crime, McM Comic Con London to name a few) which I really appreciate.

TONY & STEVE: Has the series grown in popularity as the books have been published?

MATT: It’s hard to tell. I’ve got a group of ‘core’ fans who have been there from the very first book but it’s always so nice when people reach out and tell me they’ve just got into the series. It’s one of the reasons I made all books in the Six Stories series stand-alone, so anyone could pick them up wherever they want; for example, you like vampires? Grab Beast or are you into fairy lore? Changeling is for you.

Honestly, I felt like crime novels often lacked weird monster/folklore content and so decided to write the sort of (albeit quite niche) found footage/true crime/supernatural/podcast crossovers that I would like but had no idea anyone else would!

TONY & STEVE: Matt, it’s been an absolute pleasure. We might be late to the Six Stories party, but these books made a huge impression on us both we just had to write something celebrating its absolute brilliance.

ABOUT MATT WESOLOWSKI

Matt Wesolowski is an author from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in the UK. He is an English tutor for young people in care.

‘Six Stories’ was published by Orenda Books in the spring of 2016 with follow-up ‘Hydra’ published in the winter of 2017, ‘Changeling’ in 2018, ‘Beast’ in 2019 and ‘Deity’ in 2020.

‘Six Stories’ has been optioned by a major Hollywood studio and the third book in the series, ‘Changeling’ was longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, 2019 Amazon Publishing Readers’ Award for Best Thriller and Best Independent Voice.
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‘Beast’ won the Amazon publishing award for Best Independent voice in 2020.

Further Reading

If you’re a fan of spine-chilling tales and hair-raising suspense, then you won’t want to miss the horror features page on The Ginger Nuts of Horror Review Website. This is the ultimate destination for horror enthusiasts seeking in-depth analysis, thrilling reviews, and exclusive interviews with some of the best minds in the genre. From independent films to mainstream blockbusters, the site covers a broad spectrum of horror media, ensuring that you’re always in the loop about the latest and greatest.

The passionate team behind The Ginger Nuts of Horror delivers thoughtful critiques and recommendations that delve into the nuances of storytelling, character development, and atmospheric tension. Whether you’re looking for hidden gems to stream on a dark and stormy night or want to explore the work of up-and-coming horror filmmakers, this page is packed with content that will ignite your imagination and keep you on the edge of your seat.

So grab your favorite horror-themed snacks, settle into a cozy spot, and immerse yourself in the chilling world of horror literature and film. Head over to The Ginger Nuts of Horror and embark on a journey through the eerie and the extraordinary—it’s an adventure you won’t soon forget!