Chuck McKenzie has long been one of my favourite short story writers. This collection brings together his very best horror tales from the early to mid-2000s, along with a batch of more recent stories of which I had not read before.
McKenzie offers a unique voice with his fiction, and this collection delivers his trademark mix of horror and dark fiction infused with a deft sense of tongue-in-cheek humour.
Pretty much every tale here is a winner and it was great to be able to revisit favourites such as Confessions of a Pod Person, The Shadow over Bexley, Like a Bug Underfoot and Eight-Beat Bar - an absolute classic about a DJ who receives his own unique torture in hell.
In his outro McKenzie speaks about taking a break from writing before getting back into the swing in the 2020s and the new stories here show he's not lost any of his flare and actually come back even stronger as a writer.
Title story, The Dark Man, By Referral is a brilliantly powerful story about a boy who finds support in dealing with an abusive relationship in the form of a mysterious stranger, while the Gift is a deeply personal ghost story about a man dealing with the trauma of his father's disappearance from when he was a boy.
McKenzie has always had a gift for delivering devilishly entertaining stories but these new stories - while perhaps more serious in tone than his earlier work - bring an added emotional layer to his usual horror punch.
Hopefully this is just an appetiser for what's to come from Chuck 2.0 because he is very much a writer that is at the top of his game and deserves to be more widely read.
A highly recommended read.

I did not get a change to read this before it went into the archive. If I can find a reasonably priced physical book, I will get it!

(Copied from goodreads)
Thank you NetGalley for letting me read this book!
TLDR: Very reminiscent of scary stories to tell in the dark.
I enjoyed this collection of tales. The author did a very good job at creating stories that intrigue you while subverting your expectations. I enjoyed the different lengths of the stories. Some are several pages, while others are as short as a paragraph. It gives good variation, and helps when you only feel like reading a little bit at a time.
The stories themselves were well structured for the most part. The author would set up a concept, and a lot of the time, he would surprise you with where it went, which I really enjoyed. A few that I enjoyed:
The title story, The dark man, by referral; Ominous, but not scary. I like the concept and execution. A urban legend that is spread by parents, that then becomes a kid's reality.
Retail Therapy; More psychologically scary with a great twist
The second-hand bookshop of al hazred; short with a really funny twist.
Overall I enjoyed the stories. The age range is 14-18 ish in my opinion, where the stories are spooky, but not outright horrifying.

I love single author short story collections and books like this are the reason why.

“The Dark Man, By Referral and Less Pleasant Tales” is a delightfully dark, rollicking jaunt of horror and imagination. You can feel the author’s enthusiasm coming through in each tale. Collections like these allow writers to showcase both their range and their distinct style and verve and Chuck McKenzie does both very well here. What struck me most was the utterly unique nature of each story, every one was quite unlike anything I had read before and this coming from someone who reads horror collections like these fairly often. Underneath the horror and menace, and there is plenty of both, don’t you worry, there is a unifying undercurrent of macabre whimsy. I could tell from reading that this is an author with a lifelong love of horror media, he brings that passion along with a delightfully offbeat and surprising humor to his tales.

I enjoyed the whole book but some standouts for me were “Retail Therapy”, “The Shadow Over Bexley”, and the eponymous tale “The Dark Man, By Referral”. Reading these was like watching some of the better Twilight Zone episodes, effective storytelling, profound themes, and satisfying plot twists.

While the longer stories definitely allowed McKenzie to flex his writing talents, I also really enjoyed the very brief “flash fiction” interspersed throughout this collection. I’m a firm believer that stories should be only as long as they need to effectively tell the tale. Sometimes that gives you a 598 page brick and sometimes that gives you a few well crafted paragraphs. Extremely short fiction like this can be quite demanding but the author pulls it off several times in this collection. Of these juicy tidbits I particularly liked “Moth” and “Howler”.

This collection was an entertaining and refreshingly unique reading experience for me. I would read anything new from this author on the strength of these stories alone and I do hope he writes more, I need more of his distinctive style of humorous nightmares.

It was quite refreshing to discover a talented horror author from Down Under! First time I read anything by Chuck McKenzie, but it won't be the last. The stories are well-done, with original premises and unexpected complications, some with an intricate build up, others short and spooky. I really appreciated the escalating tension in the tales in the second part of the collection. Excellent storytelling skills!
My thanks to the publisher for the ARC.

Very scary and entertaining, thought provoking and creepy. There's a lot in this book I strongly recommend it because it's original and the storytelling is excellent
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine