The Dark Man, By Referral is an interesting collection of horror short stories, with varying different focuses, such as zombies, strange creatures and medical horror

I really enjoyed The Dark Man, By Referral, as the first story in the book, it was an interesting concept, and whilst sticking to the horror theme, had a bittersweet meaning behind the story. I especially enjoyed the incredibly short stories, that were around a small paragraph in length, they felt like the sort of stories you would tell at a sleepover as a child in attempt to terrify your friends.

Despite this, there were a few issues I experienced with the book. Firstly, I wasn’t particularly comfortable with some of the language used in the story, as frankly it seemed unnecessary. Reading the story without the addition of this language would in my opinion not take away any value from the story.

As well as this, some stories felt more complete than others. Often the slightly longer short stories felt like they were really the first chapter of a book, opposed to a standalone story, as some horror elements felt missing, and instead of getting to the nitty gritty of repulsive descriptions as some short horror stories do, ended on a rather disappointing cliffhanger.

My final issue, which may attribute to being personal, was I struggled to place the timeline in some stories until specifics were mentioned, but that meant I often had to restart the short story to get a full understanding of what was going on, I feel like if the time setting was made initially clearer in some stories, it would get less jumbled. For example, in the The Dark Man, by Referral, it wasn’t until covid and google are mentioned that i understood this was set in modern day, the descriptions and my personal understanding led me to believe the story was set in the early to mid 90’s or earlier.

Overall, I would say this story is valid for 3 stars, I enjoyed some stories more than others, which is typical in a collection of short stories, and I enjoyed the explanations about the story we had from Chuck McKenzie at the end of the book.