Book Review – The Twelfth BHF Book Of Horror Stories – Dying Dead Undead.

Book Cover for the Twelfth BHF Book Of Horror Stories

Edited by Andrew Llewellyn and Ian Talbot Taylor. 2026 BHF Books.

All proceeds to Once Upon A Smile.

Spoiler alerts

Not an unbiased review as the collection includes my short story, Fresh Dead Flesh, about ghouls feeding on the dead on an English Civil War battlefield, driven to urgent measures as the fighting seems to be drawing to a close. My story is superbly illustrated by Smuzz, and most stories included have great accompanying artwork too, though the best art is the book’s front cover design by Paul Mudie, depicting the all too real horror of a Reform UK electoral victory with a zombiesque portrait of their dreadful leader, Nigel Farage and the horror font legend, The End Is Nigel (which some might assume is the book subtitle rather than Dying, Dead, Undead.

The three sections of the title allow stories to be presented in one of each of the headings (with some overlap. My own contribution is rightly in the Dead section.

Under ‘Dying’ Simon J Ballard’s Dunrottin’ has a decaying corpse cause a deadly infection for inspecting investigators that risks becoming a terrifying epidemic. Jed Vesper’s Soft Flesh, Cold Flesh tells its tale in reverse, Memento style, with a very creepy necrophile enjoying his control of his latest conquest. Richard Freeman’s The Critic has a food critic who has for too long enjoyed savaging even good restaurants so badly in his reports that they go out of business, driving many restaurateurs to suicide, facing a suitably nasty revenge. T N Shaw’s Feeding The Flame has a killer arousing suspicion from a nosy neighbor when burning the evidence in his garden, leading inevitably to more deaths in what might become a very long chain of repeat offending.

In the ‘Dead’ tales, Chris Tighe’s Crypto Bro has a man left out of a will, digging up the body of the benefactor in search of clues to his crypto currency, with deadly consequences for himself. David Huckvale’s Roadkill has zombie nature amassing steadily to take down humanity in a very Daphne Du Maurier fate for all of us. Phileas Fleabody’s Last Night(s) by John Hamilton is reminiscent of the cockroach scenes in the first Creepshow movie but with a neat twist. James Stanger’s Back Home is possibly my favourite story in the collection, in that it is a zombie-ghost story that doesn’t just have the undead character kill the people she encounters, but actually helps save others from sharing her terrible fate. Editor Andrew Llewellyn offers another necrophilia tale, Final Entry, unfortunately with the sick twisted individual falling foul of a zombie we earlier saw meet her end in a hit and run tragedy, but she is part of a much bigger developing zombie apocalypse.

Moving to the final third, the Undead section opens with Andy Allard’s Squelch which has a zombie clean up crew getting stuck in their crusher truck surrounded by the horde they are trying to sort out. This one gets very messy, literally. Jeff Brown’s Holding Hands In The Dark has the feel of a Western with the traveller in rough-backwaters bar with a yarn to tell, and what a yarn, with a very novel use of a zombified former lover. Steve Lockley & Paul Lewis combined talents to create A Creature Of Habit, another fresh insight into the zombie genre. A man is visited by the police about corpses missing from a morgue, but are they treating him as a suspect or offering him protection? Andrew M Bark offers the funniest and most ‘grim up North’ tale in Egypt In T’ Irwell as Bolton Museum’s prize Mummy exhibit finds himself on a rubbish tip, confused by trains, planes and wondering why the cat gods are so domesticated. His thoughts on Bolton Wanderers are hysterical. (I did my degree in Bolton, and visited the museum and its Egyptian displays many times). Tim Hicks offers Where Eagles Go To Hide, which has the shamelessly unlikely audacity to be a sequel to Where Eagles Dare in which, during the film’s final tense escape, Richard Burton’s lead character is separated from the others and ends up helping kill off Nazi zombies before completing his border crossing. Great fun. Stephen Lang’s Doodlebug has zombies coming to life during the Blitz but never lets the imaginary horrors overshadow the real tragedies of the war. Seb Short’s Operational Protocol For Zombie Incident shows how planning and strategy don’t always allow for every variable in a field situation. A soldier assigned to irradicate the Zoms (used in the dehumanising fashion of terms like Charlies in Vietnam and Krauts in the world wars), begins to have doubts and empathy for the undead, The undead are seen as mainly being the working classes, living closer together, while the wealthy live in more isolated properties, and therefore less likely to get caught in the house to house feeding frenzies. There are several references to ghetto herding and zombies in seaside towns (as refugees are often pushed towards). The clean up amounts to an ethnic cleansing of Blackpool, in the interest of offering it as beachfront real estate to American interests. Given the book’s cover showing the all too frightening realism of a future under Farage, Seb Short’s story is the most overtly political work on offer and a fitting conclusion to the book.

Apologies to authors not directly named or reviewed. All the stories are excellent, hopefully including my own. I also have stories in volumes 9, 10 and 11.

Links

You can buy BHF 12 here for £12.99 . https://www.amazon.co.uk/Twelfth-BHF-Book-Horror-Stories/dp/B0H2545PSH/?

Once Upon A Smile. https://onceuponasmile.org.uk/

Photos taken by myself.

Arthur Chappell