Six O’Clock House & Other Strange Tales by Rebecca Cuthbert
Watertower Hill Publishing (January 21, 2025)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Rebecca Cuthbert is a dark fiction and poetry writer living in western New York. She loves ghost stories, folklore, witchy women, and anything that involves nature getting revenge. Her debut poetry collection, In Memory of Exoskeletons (Alien Buddha Press, 2023) won a 2024 Imadjinn Award for Best Poetry Collection; the poems “Still Love” and “Bloodthirsty” were nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and “Still Love” was also nominated for a Best of the Net Award. CREEP THIS WAY: How to Become a Horror Writer With 24 Steps to Get You Ghouling (Seamus & Nunzio Productions, 2024) was nominated for a Golden Scoop Award. Her hybrid fiction and poetry collection of feminist horrors, Self-Made Monsters, is out from Alien Buddha Press. Her newest collection is a book of literary-speculative stories, Six O’Clock House & Other Strange Tales.
Six O’Clock House & Other Strange Tales is a collection of deliberately literary tales, but most of those are based around horror and dark fantasy. Revenge is a clear trope for Cuthbert, and tales like “Hey, Stranger,” in which a server has a mysterious encounter with a regular is one example of this. What makes this tale so compelling is the one-sided nature, the way that readers only hear what the server is saying, and how what we don’t hear or see is just as important as what we do hear and see. This is the sort of tale one can expect from Cuthbert. Rather than provide a typical genre story following various formulae, Cuthbert uses artistic literary techniques to push this story into experimental territory. The horror and revenge plots are still there, and readers will enjoy the story thoroughly, but the approach and tone are uniquely literary.
Other tales, like the eponymous “Six O’Clock House,” tap into Cuthbert’s ecological consciousness. While still a revenge tale, the greenhouse setting makes for a textbook Cuthbert story that is as verdant as it is horrifying. The opening tale, “Joiner,” is a more Weird tale where a bartender is plagued by frog song at night. The ecological horror that permeates this collection is strong and works well with the literary tone of the collection.
This book represents a new direction for Cuthbert’s voice, so reader familiar with her work will be rewarded with a different voice from a well-known author. Readers who aren’t familiar with Cuthbert’s voice will be thrilled to learn of a new author for them, one who is creepy and dark, finding the right balance between horror and social consciousness in her work. Six O’Clock House & Other Strange Tales by Rebecca Cuthbert is strongly recommended for any fan of horror literature.
