Review: Black Magick

By Jack Moody

Black Magick, a mystical horror anthology edited by Raven Digitalis and due for release in February 2025 through Moon Books UK, and is an incredibly unbalanced collection. The book opens with multiple stories that feel as though they were all written by the same author—equally reliant on cliché and weak prose with a penchant for stale dialogue. The characters remain one-dimensional, the pace slow and stories bloated with unnecessary filler, and the conclusions are either entirely foreseeable so as to extinguish any air of suspense, or merely fizzle out as if the authors themselves weren’t sure how the story was supposed to end until they realized it was over. Two stories in particular, “3:33” and “Fata Morgana” feel particularly amateurish in their prose and grasp of storytelling, and their authors seem to have been more interested in writing erotica with just a pinch of vague Twilight-esque, dominant-alpha romance-horror added in for taste.

The collection picks up slightly with “Automatic Writing”, a straightforward supernatural séance/demon story. It’s certainly not breaking new ground, and doesn’t elicit much reaction or feeling, but in comparison to what came before it was a welcome shift. The story is short and to the point—like an X-Files “Creature of the Week” episode, albeit with less imagination involved. It knows what it is and doesn’t try to be anything else, and for that I appreciated it.

Though what follows is perhaps the largest misstep on the part of the editor. Arriving seventh in the collection is arguably one of the most renowned and well regarded horror short stories ever written: “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe. By this point you’ll have read 130 pages of wavering quality, but to then see those first passages by a true master of the written word is like whiplash. Encountering Poe’s work after everything that had come before only shows the reader how much of a glaring distance there is between the legendary author and those previous, making “The Black Cat” feel terribly out of place.

Though perhaps the editor foresaw this happening, because the story that follows is, simply put, the sole story in this collection that saves the book from becoming a DNF.

“Don’t Forget to Feed” by Miranda S. Hewlett is easily the best original short story of the anthology. Its first act even brings to mind another Poe story, “The Pit and the Pendulum.” The protagonist is rational and endearing, each word serves an exact purpose, the setting and atmosphere is palpable with tension and dread, and the prose is fantastic. You want to know what happens next. Mystery and intrigue ooze from the end of each paragraph. The conclusion is painfully bleak yet earned. And so these two stories stand out among the entire anthology as outliers. Because what then follows is yet another vaguely horror-adjacent erotica story whose prose and dialogue recalls a made-for-TV film on the Lifetime channel. From here it’s back to the precedent firmly set by the first six stories until the anthology unceremoniously concludes.

While I can’t necessarily recommend Black Magick, I find no pleasure in writing a poor review of someone’s art. I understand the time, love, and dedication it takes to make anything, and that in and of itself is reason to celebrate the book. I also must acknowledge, however obvious, that art is subjective, and tastes differ. And the very things that I found to be unpleasing or amateurish, another reader may find delightful and full of suspense. Some of the stories did have their moments, but unfortunately those moments were doused when the authors again and again fell back into tired tropes and clunky dialogue. I was hoping for something truly magical, truly frightening—or at least original. But unfortunately, save two stories out of thirteen (one of which being over a 150 years old) I found barely a trace of those things within this anthology.