More Spooky Stories-Tanushree & Ajoy Podder

Book: More Spooky Stories
Author: Tanushree & Ajoy Podder
Illustrations: Sucharita Sengupta Suri
Publisher: HarperCollins India

Do you like your horror stories short or long?

The taxi races through the wilderness in the darkness ... Uday Sengupta is returning to his uncle's sprawling house in Bastar after a long time. As Uday picks his way through the dense foliage to reach the bungalow, a power outage plunges the place into darkness. Uday is greeted by the old retainer and makes his way to the dining hall where his uncle and his old friends are celebrating a reunion. The twelve friends are in a boisterous mood. They decide to recount their supernatural experiences to entertain the gathering. One by one, they start narrating their experiences as Uday joins them ... More sinister, more creepy, more spine-chilling, more eerie, 'More Spooky Stories' is even more spooky than the first, the bestselling 'Spooky Stories'!

More Spooky Stories is a wonderful collection of 12 horror stories that explore various aspects of the genre. The stories are wonderfully written and each one of them manages to give you the chills. The idea to weave the dozen stories the way the authors do is quite interesting and the climax, while easy to guess, is wonderfully penned. The authors have explored some interesting local stories and woven a plot around it, which adds a dash of truth to the stories, once you decide to google a couple. The storytelling is quite interesting, and while there is an element of eeriness in the stories, there is no part where the horror seems over the top. Right from the tea garden to the haunter carrier ship, the locations the authors have chosen are normal and spooky at the same time. If I had to pick favorites, the ones that stood out for me were The Creepy Doll, The Airport, The Birthday Girl and The Scholarly Spectre. A couple of things that could have been improved would be the primary story because apart from being a common thread, it didn’t provide the sort of chill the others had. Another interesting aspect of the story would have been if the storytellers would have identified themselves a bit more.

With just the right mix of spookiness, intrigue and storytelling, this is a book I would definitely recommend to the fans of the genre. The book scores a 4.5/5 for me.

I got my copy at Kunzum Books, Vasant Vihar and am reading it as a part of the Kunzum Year of Reading 2023.

Get your copy from your nearest bookstore or Amazon India.