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The Anechoic Chamber and Other Weird Tales
An anechoic chamber is a soundproofed room with no echo. The profound silence it produces is disturbing enough. But listen carefully and you’ll hear something worse … In this new collection of uncanny short stories, award-winning author Will Wiles finds sinister creatures and subtle nightmares in mundane modern environments and bureaucracy.
A cursed NHS file brings doom to whoever handles it. A memory-foam mattress breaks down the walls of sleep. A marketing executive for a property developer turns to the occult. And horror seeps from the most unexpected places: eBay purchases, boxes of holiday photographs, and the hidden corners of the smart TV menu.
While mostly modern in setting, this is a collection steeped in the tradition of the weird tale and the ghost story, and includes homages to the greats of the previous century: a doomed Edwardian antiquarian is drawn into a murderous plot involving a Roman mosaic, and river boatmen uncover eldritch terror in a deserted mining town.
You’ll never look at some things the same way again.
A cursed NHS file brings doom to whoever handles it. A memory-foam mattress breaks down the walls of sleep. A marketing executive for a property developer turns to the occult. And horror seeps from the most unexpected places: eBay purchases, boxes of holiday photographs, and the hidden corners of the smart TV menu.
While mostly modern in setting, this is a collection steeped in the tradition of the weird tale and the ghost story, and includes homages to the greats of the previous century: a doomed Edwardian antiquarian is drawn into a murderous plot involving a Roman mosaic, and river boatmen uncover eldritch terror in a deserted mining town.
You’ll never look at some things the same way again.
- GenresShort StoriesHorror
163 pages, Paperback
Published March 15, 2025
5 people are currently reading
125 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 6, 2025
Unsettling domestic spaces, the absurdity of modern life, isolation and disconnection... these are some of the themes running through Will Wiles’ excellent collection. The title story kicks things off with a clean, controlled unease. A man renting an anechoic chamber (a virtually soundless room) for a work test finds himself drawn into its silence, convinced there’s something – or someone – whispering in the void. It’s a solid piece that establishes the mood: introspective, subtly eerie, with a touch of psychological dissonance.
And then we hit the real highlights. ‘Tesserae’ is nothing short of stunning, a perfectly constructed historical horror story that’s as elegant as it is inevitable. An academic, an earl’s collection of artefacts, and a creeping realisation that those tiny, seemingly innocent mosaic tiles are arranging themselves into a pattern no-one should ever see. ‘A Private Square of Sky’ is a superb slow burn in which the protagonist’s visit to a Barcelona apartment complex becomes an architectural fever dream. Then there’s ‘Deeds’, the funniest and most caustic story here, in which an author is roped into writing for a property developer’s vacuous arts initiative (you get the sense Wiles is having a lot of fun with this one).
Other stories range from clever and fun (‘Notes on London’s Housing Crisis’, a biting little dystopian satire) to ‘great concept but slightly wobbly landing’ (I adored the characterisation and detail in ‘Moths’, but felt it ended too soon; ‘The Meat Stream’, which wouldn’t be out of place in a collection like Eliza Clark’s She’s Always Hungry, is fun but possibly the most conventional piece here). But even the less spectacular entries still bring something interesting to the table.
I feel like I talk too much about urban horror, and to be fair, The Anechoic Chamber isn’t solely that; it’s not purely London- or city-focused but flexible, ranging from the folkloric to the futuristic, always with Wiles’ sharp eye for unsettling detail. But I do think if you enjoyed Ray Newman’s Municipal Gothic, Gary Budden’s London Incognita, Daniel Carpenter’s Hunting by the River or Nicholas Royle’s London Gothic, you’d get a lot out of this. Highly recommended.
And then we hit the real highlights. ‘Tesserae’ is nothing short of stunning, a perfectly constructed historical horror story that’s as elegant as it is inevitable. An academic, an earl’s collection of artefacts, and a creeping realisation that those tiny, seemingly innocent mosaic tiles are arranging themselves into a pattern no-one should ever see. ‘A Private Square of Sky’ is a superb slow burn in which the protagonist’s visit to a Barcelona apartment complex becomes an architectural fever dream. Then there’s ‘Deeds’, the funniest and most caustic story here, in which an author is roped into writing for a property developer’s vacuous arts initiative (you get the sense Wiles is having a lot of fun with this one).
Other stories range from clever and fun (‘Notes on London’s Housing Crisis’, a biting little dystopian satire) to ‘great concept but slightly wobbly landing’ (I adored the characterisation and detail in ‘Moths’, but felt it ended too soon; ‘The Meat Stream’, which wouldn’t be out of place in a collection like Eliza Clark’s She’s Always Hungry, is fun but possibly the most conventional piece here). But even the less spectacular entries still bring something interesting to the table.
I feel like I talk too much about urban horror, and to be fair, The Anechoic Chamber isn’t solely that; it’s not purely London- or city-focused but flexible, ranging from the folkloric to the futuristic, always with Wiles’ sharp eye for unsettling detail. But I do think if you enjoyed Ray Newman’s Municipal Gothic, Gary Budden’s London Incognita, Daniel Carpenter’s Hunting by the River or Nicholas Royle’s London Gothic, you’d get a lot out of this. Highly recommended.
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May 5, 2025Due to timing, I couldn’t review Will Wiles's debut collection, The Anechoic Chamber and Other Weird Tales, for Locus. Thanks, Jeebus, for this Substack, then.
When he’s not writing epic fantasies under the name W. P Wiles,* Will Wiles is happy to sit in that uncomfortable grey area between literary and fantastic fiction. This slim collection of nine stories is evidence of the strange, uneasy places Wiles likes to visit. I say places because there’s often an architectural aspect to Wiles's work.** The Way Inn features a creepy motel, while Wiles's third novel, Plume, depicts contemporary London as a dystopian landscape.
The collection’s title story also features a physical space, a soundproof chamber designed to reduce decibel levels to subzero.*** The protagonist is using the chamber to test out a silent air purifier (personally, I like the white noise). Our protagonist wants to experience the soundless chamber for himself, only to detect a sound, “the faintest hiss or whisper, suggestive in its sibilance of an aged, leaky tap at the other end of an old house.” Any reader versed in the uncanny will know where this story is going, but how Wiles takes us there makes this such an unsettling piece.
After a lovely bit of M.R. James spookiness involving an ancient puzzle (“Tesserae”), we get “The Meat Stream”, which sounds as disgusting as the title suggests. The story is set during the COVID lockdown when a couple discovers a new streaming service called HUNGER, where all types of meat are grilled and sliced. Our narrator hates the show but can’t seem to convince her partner to turn it off, even when a “film of yellowish residue” starts to appear on the screen. Will Wiles, with, I imagine, a devilish smile, doubles and triples down on the ick factor.
In “A Private Square of Sky,” Wiles returns to architecture, specifically a uniquely constructed apartment building in Barcelona. If “Tesserae” is reminiscent of M.R. James or Arthur Machen, this story is all Lovecraft. “Notes on London’s Housing Crisis”, much like “Plume”, centres on… well… the housing crisis. Except this story, written like a think piece, depicts an alternative future where houses are rejected for modular apartments that can be slotted in and out of the high-rise building of your choice (well, technically, the “crisis” in the title indicates this isn’t working as planned).
My favourite story in a collection with zero duds is “The Acknowledgements”. The opening sentence, “I was once told that people in the publishing industry read the acknowledgements first,” momentarily fooled me into thinking that these were Wiles’s actual acknowledgments for The Anechoic Chamber.**** Nup. These are the acknowledgements for a much stranger work and the journey on getting there—the gradual descent into darkness—is both funny and disturbing.
Great collection. Well worth your time.
*The Last Blade Priest is great, and I’m looking forward to the sequel.
**Not entirely surprising, given he’s a freelance journalist interested in modern design and architecture.
***I wasn’t aware subzero decibels were a thing. This is why I read fiction. To learn stuff.
****Look, I was reading this as a Kindle-modified PDF, and sometimes it’s hard to know where you are and… it is the collection’s last story.
When he’s not writing epic fantasies under the name W. P Wiles,* Will Wiles is happy to sit in that uncomfortable grey area between literary and fantastic fiction. This slim collection of nine stories is evidence of the strange, uneasy places Wiles likes to visit. I say places because there’s often an architectural aspect to Wiles's work.** The Way Inn features a creepy motel, while Wiles's third novel, Plume, depicts contemporary London as a dystopian landscape.
The collection’s title story also features a physical space, a soundproof chamber designed to reduce decibel levels to subzero.*** The protagonist is using the chamber to test out a silent air purifier (personally, I like the white noise). Our protagonist wants to experience the soundless chamber for himself, only to detect a sound, “the faintest hiss or whisper, suggestive in its sibilance of an aged, leaky tap at the other end of an old house.” Any reader versed in the uncanny will know where this story is going, but how Wiles takes us there makes this such an unsettling piece.
After a lovely bit of M.R. James spookiness involving an ancient puzzle (“Tesserae”), we get “The Meat Stream”, which sounds as disgusting as the title suggests. The story is set during the COVID lockdown when a couple discovers a new streaming service called HUNGER, where all types of meat are grilled and sliced. Our narrator hates the show but can’t seem to convince her partner to turn it off, even when a “film of yellowish residue” starts to appear on the screen. Will Wiles, with, I imagine, a devilish smile, doubles and triples down on the ick factor.
In “A Private Square of Sky,” Wiles returns to architecture, specifically a uniquely constructed apartment building in Barcelona. If “Tesserae” is reminiscent of M.R. James or Arthur Machen, this story is all Lovecraft. “Notes on London’s Housing Crisis”, much like “Plume”, centres on… well… the housing crisis. Except this story, written like a think piece, depicts an alternative future where houses are rejected for modular apartments that can be slotted in and out of the high-rise building of your choice (well, technically, the “crisis” in the title indicates this isn’t working as planned).
My favourite story in a collection with zero duds is “The Acknowledgements”. The opening sentence, “I was once told that people in the publishing industry read the acknowledgements first,” momentarily fooled me into thinking that these were Wiles’s actual acknowledgments for The Anechoic Chamber.**** Nup. These are the acknowledgements for a much stranger work and the journey on getting there—the gradual descent into darkness—is both funny and disturbing.
Great collection. Well worth your time.
*The Last Blade Priest is great, and I’m looking forward to the sequel.
**Not entirely surprising, given he’s a freelance journalist interested in modern design and architecture.
***I wasn’t aware subzero decibels were a thing. This is why I read fiction. To learn stuff.
****Look, I was reading this as a Kindle-modified PDF, and sometimes it’s hard to know where you are and… it is the collection’s last story.
Read
July 18, 2025hit and miss, largely reads like a collection of well written creepypastas. is at its best when playing out like bizarre black mirror episodes
April 30, 2025
An outstanding anthology of short stories each of which linger in the memory.
October 30, 2025
An amusing and skilful homage to classic horror story tropes and situations, from the technological to the historic. Some of the mechanisms used are highly ingenious.
June 4, 2025
An excellent collection of short stories. Different and weird.
April 19, 2025
Not every story is a banger but the ones that are are really fucking good. And the others aren't bad either.
April 30, 2025
Picked this up on a whim and read it basically in one sitting. My first, and hopefully not last, encounter with what I’ll refer to as “architectural horror.” I really enjoyed all stories but one - “Notes on London’s Housing Crisis” didn’t do much for me. “A Report to the Imperial Customs Office” starts off as a Kafka-esque tale of bureaucracy and devolves into one of the best subterranean cosmic horror stories I’ve read. I also loved Whitechapel Jen’s brief reappearance in the final story - hinting at a shared mythology? Looking forward to more short fiction from Wiles.
July 28, 2025
Architectural nerderdy, the ancient and the modern, housing crises, imperial loot, memory, sensory deprivation, obsessions, hauntings...weird tales indeed!
April 2, 2025
Of the nine stories in Will Wiles’ short story collection, The Anechoic Chamber and Other Weird Tales, about two were ok and the others were generally quite bad.
The Meat Stream was a bizarre Cronenberg-esque piece set during lockdown when a couple, bored of having watched everything available, notice a new streaming service called HUNGER and the man becomes obsessed with watching a stream of a kebab. And then the TV starts doing odd things… Very original, unpredictable story with a slightly humorous bent to it, this was the best of a poor bunch.
A Private Square of Sky is set in Barcelona in an artistically-designed block of flats that holds a strange secret in its courtyard: a glimpse, at night, into another realm, or possibly ours, in the past, present or future, but only to residents and only in a small square of sky within the development.
Wiles uses his knowledge of architecture (another hat he wears is that of an architectural journalist) to set a compelling scene and the mystery of the flats was intriguing. The ending was wonderfully creepy too - an unexpected Lovecraftian twist.
A few other stories - Moths, A Report to the Imperial Customs Office, The Acknowledgements - are similarly horror-flavoured, with hints of ghosts and madness-influenced murders spackling the pages. But, like Lovecraft, Wiles is often less overt in his horror and the remaining stories are in that horror-adjacent subgenre of weird fiction so I think the title is aptly named.
Unfortunately the other seven stories range from forgettable to boring. There are some interesting premises - a chamber of a silence most profound in the title story or a puzzle that foretells the future in Tesserae - but Wiles’ rendering of them is weak and often too vague and underwhelming. One story - Deeds - completely escapes me, it was that dull.
Will Wiles wrote a great novel - Plume - that I’d recommend checking out, but his short fiction collected in The Anechoic Chamber and Other Weird Tales is much less impressive and disappointing.
The Meat Stream was a bizarre Cronenberg-esque piece set during lockdown when a couple, bored of having watched everything available, notice a new streaming service called HUNGER and the man becomes obsessed with watching a stream of a kebab. And then the TV starts doing odd things… Very original, unpredictable story with a slightly humorous bent to it, this was the best of a poor bunch.
A Private Square of Sky is set in Barcelona in an artistically-designed block of flats that holds a strange secret in its courtyard: a glimpse, at night, into another realm, or possibly ours, in the past, present or future, but only to residents and only in a small square of sky within the development.
Wiles uses his knowledge of architecture (another hat he wears is that of an architectural journalist) to set a compelling scene and the mystery of the flats was intriguing. The ending was wonderfully creepy too - an unexpected Lovecraftian twist.
A few other stories - Moths, A Report to the Imperial Customs Office, The Acknowledgements - are similarly horror-flavoured, with hints of ghosts and madness-influenced murders spackling the pages. But, like Lovecraft, Wiles is often less overt in his horror and the remaining stories are in that horror-adjacent subgenre of weird fiction so I think the title is aptly named.
Unfortunately the other seven stories range from forgettable to boring. There are some interesting premises - a chamber of a silence most profound in the title story or a puzzle that foretells the future in Tesserae - but Wiles’ rendering of them is weak and often too vague and underwhelming. One story - Deeds - completely escapes me, it was that dull.
Will Wiles wrote a great novel - Plume - that I’d recommend checking out, but his short fiction collected in The Anechoic Chamber and Other Weird Tales is much less impressive and disappointing.
March 12, 2025
A room of total silence, meat coming from the tv, an unaccountable square of Barcelona sky, these weird uncanny tales are beautifully told. Pure reading joy.
April 27, 2025
Most of the stories were pretty mid or just bad, and the ones I did end up liking had a lot of build up and only got interesting in the last few pages
My favourite was The Tesserae
My favourite was The Tesserae
April 30, 2025
Unsettling tales of all stripes in here, all of which warranted rereading. A great range of styles and settings, and all thoughtfully creepy. Top drawer.
July 14, 2025
Surprisingly riveting for a short-story collection. Every story in here had me gripped and truly unsettled.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews