What Goes Around, edited by David Owain Hughes and Jonathan Edward Ondrashek

What Goes Around is an anthology collecting fifteen stories of the dark, macabre, horror, and sometimes gross. The stories that are contained within the collection are quite varied, making this a little hard of a review to write. Overall there didn't seem to be a general theme that I could find, the stories were kind of all over the place. One story you'd read would be quiet horror, while the next read more like a partly-thought-out Gross Out story from the World Horror Convention. Then the next story would go dark and demented.

I think the downside would be that the stories are in fact inconsistent in certain ways, and this can draw away from the reader's enjoyment. I did find quite a few good stories within, especially Taming the Tongue, The Killing Floor, and Knackered, among them. But then there were some that almost seemed unthought out, maybe even a little childish in the presentation, which unfortunately turned me off.

In the end, there were definitely quite a few fun stories to read, but not enough to make me feel like I was totally enamored with the collection enough to keep myself reading until the wee hours of the morning. I'd give it a C overall, and hope that the next collection that is put together is a little bit more consistent for the reader, so as to really draw them into the stories, and win them over with that "wow" factor.

Review by Kyle Lybeck