Continuing my freaky foray into short horror stories, I took my first cautious steps into a collection called Ashes and Entropy that bills itself as an anthology of "cosmic horror, noir and neo-noir".

'Head on the Door' by Erinn L. Kemper, a delightfully twisted tale towards the beginning of the book, is about a couple of stoner metal freaks stripping the paint from an old house when one of them discovers a knot about the door that looks remarkably like a face. When a poet missing since the fifties is found dead in Mexico, that he resembles the dark swirls and folds above the door. They find another face in the wood, then a child who's been missing for twenty-five years reappears. Interwoven with these revelations is a mysterious character watching them from a house across the street.

There's a lot to learn from this well-crafted story: the way Kemper builds the characters of the 'crazy drugged-out hippy musicians'; the well-orchestrated suspension of disbelief; and, most importantly, that ending. The resolution of the story is the reason that we read short tales of terror and suspense. Ever since I read Roald Dahl's wonderfully creepy 'The Landlady', I've been a fan of what authors of the horrific and macabre can achieve in the space of a few pages. The end of 'Head on the Door' resonates like fingernails down a chalkboard.