We All Hear Stories in the Dark

We All Hear Stories in the Dark #1-3

by Robert Shearman

Once upon a time there was a man who lost his wife, and tried to find her by reading all the books in the world.

An old woman sits in the dark. She has 101 stories to tell you—the last stories in existence. But the route through them is challenging. Each tale branches into multiple paths, dependent upon the choices you make.

Navigate your way through a labyrinth of colliding and contrasting tales. A brand new Arabian Nights—except this time Scheherazade isn’t spinning yarns to save her own life. Follow the right path, and win back your wife from the dead.

There are fairy tales and myths, adventure stories, horror stories. Comedies and tragedies, fantasy and fables and realist tales of modern life. Some of the stories are funny, and some are moving. Some of them are frightening. Most of them are very, very strange.

Genres: Short Stories, Horror, Fiction, Fantasy, Collections, Literature, Weird Fiction

1799 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2020

About the author

Robert Shearman has worked as a writer for television, radio and the stage. He was appointed resident dramatist at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter and has received several international awards for his theatrical work, including the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the World Drama Trust Award and the Guinness Award for Ingenuity in association with the Royal National Theatre. His plays have been regularly produced by Alan Ayckbourn, and on BBC Radio by Martin Jarvis. However, he is probably best known as a writer for Doctor Who, reintroducing the Daleks for its BAFTA winning first series, in an episode nominated for a Hugo Award.

His first collection of short stories, Tiny Deaths, was published by Comma Press in 2007. It won the World Fantasy Award for best collection, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. One of the stories from it was selected by the National Library Board of Singapore as part of the annual Read! Singapore campaign. In 2008 his short story project for BBC7, The Chain Gang, won him a Sony Award, and he provided a second series for them in 2009.

He is now at work on his first novel.

Reviews

[Adam Stevenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book kicked me out… I wanted to read further but it didn’t let me.

I know books don’t usually do that but We All Hear Stories in the Dark is not an ordinary book. It’s a near two-thousand page short story collection where at the end of one story there are hints for several others, the reader then moves on to the next story following the hints. These leads to a totally unique reading experience, dipping in and out of three volumes as the stories lead you. There’s a huge sense of excitement when you finish one story and receive suggestions for the next which strengthens the engagement with it.

One of the strangest elements of the book is that you never know exactly how far in the book you are. In a normal book this is easy, you merely look at the pages you’ve read and see how many are left but jumping around as you do, there’s no way of knowing. Unfortunately, this means that the book can also buck and knock you off before you are ready, which it did to me.

Of course, I could have ignored the rules, gone back to before I was lead to the end or simply turn to another story but part of the charm of the book, it’s own peculiar magic, is following where it takes you - even if that is to a premature end. My first temptation to break its rules was when I was at work with one volume and lead to another that was at home, I could have picked another story, one in the volume I had with me, but that would have seemed dishonest in some way.

As for the stories themselves, they were a fantastic mixture yet all hung together. I don’t wish to spoil the surprises in store for any future reader, but each one lived up to the promise in the (secret) essay towards the middle, they each packed a punch and disturbed in some sense. Some of the stories were instantly unnerving, some grew unnerving and some became unnerving at the end. There were ideas and images in this book which will stay with me for a long time. Although I preferred some stories than others, I can promise that none that I read bored me and many gripped me tight. It’s not just that the book is structured in such a unique way, it’s that it’s a book of really good stories structured such. I usually get tired of short stories and have never read thirty-four of them in a row and that stands testament to the quality of the stories.

I haven’t finished with this book, I will return and I shall conquer it. I’ve even sussed out where the secret map to the quickest way through the stories is, but that would be cheating, wouldn’t it?

For those who wish to compare their progress to mine, here is a list of the stories I read and in which order;

Prologue
Fall of Troy
Petty vengeance
Nine letters about spit
Dig deep
Shelter from the storm
Oink
The all new adventures of Robin Hood
This is why we can’t have nice things
Cannon fodder
The girl from Ipanema
Jason Zerillo is an annoying prick
Send me to Hell
Talent will out
The touch of Baby Stalin’s skin
Some unusual facts about Laurel and Hardy
Thou shalt not
The most disappointing story in the book
And this is where we falter
And this is where we fall
The desperate woman with the rain sodden hair
Masterwork
It flows from the mouth
The sixteenth step
Master of the macabre
Bedtime stories for Yasmin
The dark space in the house in the house in the garden at the centre of the world
Pumpkin kids
Tom is in the attic
Peckish
Night of the might have beens
Suffer little children
Scheherazade’s last story
101 heartbeats

[Lynette · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's no secret that I love Rob Shearman (and his writing, but honestly, he is a very lovely man and I have so enjoyed all of our chats.) I'm generally not a fan of short stories, but I have a few exceptions: Shirley Jackson and Rob Shearman.

First of all, I recommend keeping track of what you've read, otherwise you'll forget a few stories in. I kept a list in my phone. I got to my 41st story before I ran out of new stories except the final one.

Second, this is not just a collection of short stories, it's a true work of art. Every time I finished a story and had to choose the next one, I'd read the list with great anticipation. Would the next story I chose be scary? Sad? Totally fucked up? Or maybe heartwarming? Sometimes I'd make my decision in a second. Sometimes I agonized between two or three choices. It truly made for a totally unique reading experience.

I tweeted Rob to see if I should consider the book "Read" when I finished the final story or when I'd finished all 101. He replied, "Oh, you've read it, as far as I'm concerned! You've finished *your* version of the book. It's as much about the stories you reject and never find, as the ones you choose! If you give it a second go, of course that's up to you. :)"

[James Lark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I should start by admitting that I have only read 81 of stories in this book. As you may be aware, they are designed to follow a sequence of the reader’s deciding, like a literary homage to those ‘choose your own adventure’ series where you got a choice of pathways to follow at the end of each section; and, in much the same vein, there is only one pathway that will take you all the way through this book, one ‘correct’ order. So, in spite of some minor cheating along the way, I reached the end having read only 81 of the 101 tales available. Though I feel sure that the author would say that it doesn’t mean that I haven’t read the book, it just means that it will be different next time.

Alternatively, the author might say that I haven’t actually finished the book at all, given what happens on the last page. Or on the last page I got to, at any rate. Perhaps it would be best to consider this review a work in progress, and my ‘date finished’ on Goodreads aspirational rather than literal.

I know that I read 81 stories, because there was a point at which I realised I was going to need to start keeping a spreadsheet to keep track of which of these tales I had actually read. (In fact my record keeping was a bit suspect at times, so I almost certainly didn’t read 81 stories; there were a couple of occasions when I found myself reading a story for a second time, though they were just as enjoyable the second time round so that didn’t matter.)

Oh, and when I say some minor cheating along the way, I mean like how in the choose your own adventure books you’d sense that choosing the path through the meteor storm might not be such a brilliant idea and keep your thumb in the page just in case you needed to skip back and take a different option. That sort of cheating. I didn’t read any of the stories out of sequence or anything like that. And for the same reason, I don’t feel I can dip in and pick out the stories I didn’t get to. This feels like a work that has to be approached as a whole.

Which says something about the extent to which the presentation is more than a mere gimmick; the ‘path’ through the stories is contextualised by an umbrella story which effectively (more effectively than I ever imagined it would) gives a genuine sense of continuity to the whole experience, drawing the threads together between consecutive tales, or reminding you of things you’ve already read. You are guided through the tales by an old lady, herself part of a tale, a story about telling stories in which reading stories is an essential plot device, effectively turning you into part of the story as you read further. Reading ‘We All Hear Stories In the Dark’ feels like a whole experience beyond the tales themselves; the brief introductions or interruptions other writers have provided, the evocative illustrations by Reggie Oliver, the variant author biographies, the gorgeous design itself and the quotes that litter the pages (one of which taunts the reader with the idea that somewhere within the volumes there is a ‘map’ to navigate them, which after much frustrated searching I concluded was a cruel tease, made all the more aggravating when I worked out where said map was just pages before I finished the book) (or failed to finish the book). Even my partner felt like he was part of it, since he was the one who kept having to fetch different volumes for me when I was reading in the bath.

There are common themes and recurring images that make these stories, stylistically varied and occasionally unpredictable though they are, feel of a piece. (I think that’s one of the reasons why the spreadsheet was necessary – it became difficult to remember which ones I had actually read, particularly from just a title, particularly when some of the titles could apply almost as well to a different story in the book. Besides which, 101 stories is a lot of stories to remember.) They revisit ideas like storytelling and fairy tales, childhood, marriage and infidelity, God and religion, clowns. A lot of these areas (clowns especially) unlock dark wells of self-doubt and insecurity, and the stories seem to tap equally comfortably into adult insecurities and fears about mortality as they do into childhood nightmares.

Not that they ever feel samey. In fact, one of the huge achievements here is to have written a collection of stories which simultaneously feel consistent and offer such wildly inventive variety. (I mean, it’s a huge achievement to have written this many stories at all, I could forgive a fair bit of repetition. But I didn’t need to.) Robert Shearman has a unique and recognisable voice, yet he is able to turn it from quirky comedy to domestic drama, from conceptual whimsy to historical fantasy, from the surreal to the downright horrific. Sometimes within the same short story. At times the voice becomes knowingly self-referential and there are times when the prose is turned onto the narrator himself (or herself? at times we seem to be listening to the old lady, though we are definitely sometimes listening to Robert Shearman, so perhaps he, too, is just part of the story).

All of which makes it quite difficult to write specifically about the content. Well, there are 101 stories to write about for a start. And they run quite the gamut of emotions, though I suppose one common factor is that a lot of them a laugh out loud funny, and a lot of them break your heart. (Sometimes both things simultaneously.) There is a strong element of the dreamlike or twisted, though often the twist comes in an unexpected place, or a single sentence reveals a subtly different reality to the one we are used to; and yet this is not a collection of stories with ‘plot twists’ or surprise endings – I feel that Shearman is too committed to the worlds he creates to throw them away on a crass reveal. In fact, the most surprising thing about the way the stories unfold is often the tonal shifts, where something superficially horrific will unexpectedly give way to pathos, or a story of raw emotion will suddenly do something unexpectedly cynical. These stories shock when you’re least expecting them to (that is the nature of a shock I suppose), but when you’re looking out for a shock they have a habit of doing something far subtler (that, I suppose, is more of a surprise than a shock).

There are immensely strong and compelling flights of imagination throughout – concepts that brought to mind some of the potent ideas in Borges short stories (but imagine Borges with the acerbic wit of Saki and the filthy humour of Roald Dahl rolled into the mix) – but to give examples would at the very least ruin the stories and more to the point reduce them to mere concepts when they are anything but.

The only other thing to say is that it is all beautifully written; Shearman’s love of language oozes onto every page, whether in the economic wit or the verbose digressions, written with deft control and the feel for drama that I think comes from a background in theatre (though communicating that instinct without an actor to read your words is no small feat).

Perhaps that’s not quite the only other thing to say. My final observation is not about the book itself, but I think worth noting all the same: and it is that, since beginning to read ‘We All Hear Stories In the Dark’ (which was a while ago – there are 101 stories in it, did I mention?), I been writing short stories myself. Constantly. Not that I haven’t dabbled in the past – usually in between what I considered bigger projects, treating the short form as something of a palate cleanser, an activity for when I didn’t have other priorities hanging over me. But not any more: I have been writing one story after another, as if these ideas are forcing themselves onto the page (not 101 of them, but a goodly number nevertheless), even though to be frank I have had quite substantial other priorities hanging over me. After a few months of obsessive, sleep-deprived creativity, I found it necessary to give up my job (well, they asked me not to come back after failing to turn up for so many weeks). My partner walked out on me because I ‘never got off that bloody computer’ (and actually the peace and quiet has been helpful). Things I used to consider important like ironing clothes, or washing clothes, or getting dressed in clothes, suddenly don’t seem to matter any more – and if I don’t see other people as much as I used to (well, at all), and the mess is piling up a bit, and the fridge doesn’t quite smell right, and the pile of bills on the doormat is sort of stopping the front door from opening properly any more (why would I need it to when I never go outdoors?!), then I’m inclined to think that I’ve made a sensible trade when you consider how many more worlds I have to escape into now, how much broader my horizons are, how much more colourful and varied and rich my whole life experience is now.

I don’t think I can thank Robert Shearman alone for this – as I said, I have dabbled with short stories in the past. But reading this book unlocked something, if only more of a sense of urgency over getting ideas into writing. And it feels highly appropriate that a book about storytelling has, however tangentially, resulted in more stories.

A strong recommend: an astonishing achievement, a reading experience like no other.

Life changing, in fact.

[Carolyn Drake · Rating 5 out of 5]

It feels a bit odd to say that I've read this book, as I have only finished my first journey through it. I pooled some birthday money to buy this three volume, 1800 page set of 101 short stories, and it seemed like a real extravagance. I haven't regretted it for a moment.
There are a myriad of different paths through the stories, because you don't read it in a linear way. After each one, you get a page giving you thought-provoking decisions to make about which tale you turn to next, as you flip from volume to volume, stumbling across messages on your way to the end point. You might have read just a handful of stories, you might have read nearly all; there is apparently just one order that will take you through every single story in one continuous path, and better statisticians than I might be able to work out the odds of doing this!
It felt like a real adventure, but its original and ingenious structure would be wasted if the tales didn't grip, intrigue and enthral. These stories are fabulous. They all share a dark undercurrent, but range from true horror and tragedy to the wildly funny.
My first trip took in - amongst other yarns - the mysterious disappearance of Stan Laurel from all Laurel & Hardy's films; a family taking part in an archaeological dig in the future to unearth their own remains; a man plagued by dreams of dangerous wolves in a surreally dark ice age; a St Petersburg pet shop owner providing drooling doggy subjects to a certain scientist with a bell; a human rug; and a breathtaking final tour de force examination of love in every form imaginable, consisting of 101 different mini tales.
A fabulous tour de force to treasure, savour, and revisit for a different trip every time.

[Des Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will simply confirm my powder is now effectively wet … with tears.
And that this book IS an embarrassment of riches as well as, for me, a literary epiphany.

I am afraid my detailed story-title alphabeticised review elsewhere under my name is far too long for posting here. Above was my conclusion.

[David H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

We All Hear Stories in the Dark is one of the most fun ideas I've seen for a collection. With a frame story guiding the beginning, you're asked to try to read all 101(!) short stories in the book in a way that will get you to every single story with repeating. At the end of each story, you've given a choice of five stories to read next, and you must choose where to read next. Of course, given how many stories there are, this book is actually three volumes. And of course, with my luck, I usually had to switch volumes after every story (from Vol. 1 to Vol. 3 to Vol. 2 and back to Vol. 3 again and so on). It was fun, but not something I could easy carry around, so I could only read it at home.

(If you can't be bothered, there is a map in one of the stories that will give you a particular pathway, but I urge people to try finding something on their own for a couple tries if you have the patience.)

Most of the stories were fantastical, but many were just fictional (contemporary or historical), and given Shearman's background, many were also horror, which isn't typically my thing. But Shearman has a delightful (and very British) writing style, and even though I had never read him before picking up this book, he was never difficult to read, which was a pleasure given how much we had to read: 1759 pages! However, I will say that I was very puzzled by the number of stories with clowns. Out of 101 stories, there were about 6 or 7 where clowns were major or minor components to the story. I just feel like the clown content was much too high.

I wish I had the patience to sit down and write something substantial about every single story, but I'll just direct you to my incoherent status updates to this book, and state that--as one might predict from the frame narrative, there is a lot about grief. The very first story, "The Grand Adventure," had me sobbing because of how hard its premise hit me in my deepest desire. Other favorites of mine included "The Fall of Troy," "Ice in the Bedroom", "The War Artist," "Unfinished," "The Pillow Menu," "Jonas Rust," "The Smell of Burnt Orange," "Pumpkin Kids," and "Master of the Macabre." One of the most horrifying of the stories was clearly "Baby Sick," but it was clearly noted as such and there's even a page warning you away from it.

There's an essay in the book somewhere where the author talks frankly to the reader about the project, and some of what went into it, and I was saddened to know that he too had lost his father (and his mother) during the writing of the project. I'd give him a hug if I could and thank him for writing this collection.

[Bob Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely incredible. I have read this but not finished it. Three volumes of short stories which offer a different route depending on your choices. I finished the route in 4 stories and each was outstanding. Now I want to start again with new choices and read more amazing stories.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s never a bad thing to read something outside your usual comfort zone. We All Hear Stories in the Dark is just that: a near 1800 page collection of 101 short stories; funny, sad, disturbing and almost all fantastical. How many you read, and in what order, is largely up to chance, and very few people will manage to read all of them. The reader navigates their way through the book by choosing the next story from a menu at the end of each tale, rather in the manner of the ‘choose your own adventure’ books that were popular in the Seventies and Eighties. I managed to read 56 before the book ejected me. There is only one route through that will enable the reader to read all 101 stories, and despite occasional reminders that there is a map hidden somewhere in the book that would lead you through all of them if only you could find it, it’s not till you get to the end that you realise where it’s been hiding. How wonderful though, to see that a 350 year old art form is still being reinvented in new and exciting ways.

[Ishan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bedtime Stories for Yasmin
Unfinished
Mond
The Family Picnic
Brand New Shiny Shiny
Angels in Australia
Ice in the Bedroom
Lo! He Abhors Not the Virgin's Womb
A Short History of Tall Buildings
Night of the Might Have Beens
Please Me
That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love
The Fall of Troy
Death to the French
Sounding Brass Tinkling Cymbal
Dumb Lucy
Slow Handclap for the Moronic Horde
Girl From Ipenema
Jason Zerrilo is an Annoying Prick
101 Heartbeats

These are the stories I read in my first journey through Robert Shearman's dark, strange and utterly enchanting masterpiece of a short story collection. Not a bad one in the bunch, and I certainly intend to revisit it to see what other wonderful stories are in this book. I just love the peculiar synergy that takes place in the juxtaposition of these stories, and the seemingly endless font of imagination from Shearman keeps it all fresh and inventive. I cannot recommend this enough. It's a unique experience that I think everyone should have for themselves.

[James Selby · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really can’t understand all the rave reviews of these volumes. I’ve read a dozen or so of the stories but can read no more. I like weird fiction - Aickman, Reggie Oliver & Quentin S Crisp, etc - and bought the volumes on the strength of a good review in the Spectator. But despite a superficially intriguing premise, they turned out to be a great disappointment.

The book is structured around an overarching storyline involving the death of the protagonist’s wife and his desire to bring her back from the dead. He turns to a mysterious library which somehow enables him to read “all the books in the world” in a very short space of time - a feat supposedly made possible because he was made to read them "in the right order for him”. He is then told that there are only 101 stories left in the world, that they must be read to him by a mysterious storyteller and that if he listens to them all - “in the right order for him” - he will get his wife back. 

After this introductory piece the reader must choose from a number of story options presented by the storyteller so he can navigate through the collection "in the right order for him”. This process is repeated at the end of each story, so the reader will find himself jumping unpredictably between volumes according to the choices he makes. Get the idea?

I said I found this a superficially intriguing premise. Intriguing, because the order in which one experiences things really does matter. After all, don't our experiences change us? - aren't they more than just passive accumulations, actively conditioning how we react to and assimilate future experiences? But the author doesn't appear to have given this much thought. 

The "you" in the "right order for you" appears to be a fixed entity, unchanged by his experiences, and to which the "right order" has only an obscure and (unless the crude "tick-box" style questionnaire completed at the library is intended to supply this defect) unelucidated relationship. For example, while the protagonist is supposed to have read "all the books in the world", in all the original languages, including the lost books of the Library of Alexandria, etc, he appears oddly unchanged by what one would expect to be a fundamentally transformative experience. Wouldn’t the “you” of one lifetime’s experience be overwhelmed and submerged by the experiences of countless thousands of others? In other words, what appeared to be a superficially intriguing premise boils down to little more than a clumsy device to link the stories in the volumes, lending them the appearance of a unity and a coherence that they don't really possess. While this might do as a premise for a children's book, this kind of flabby thinking is clearly unsatisfactory in imaginative writing for adults, which must retain a foothold in the plausible in order to be effective.

This brings us to the stories themselves. One or two are actually quite good - I particularly enjoyed ‘The Sixteenth Step’ - but all suffer from more or less the same faults, which I shall call "flatness" and "flabbiness". By "flatness" I mean a deficiency in the kind of background establishing and scene setting that give weird fiction its bite. Without this kind of substance, the world of the stories appears sham, cliched, banal and oddly monotonous, the product of a single limited standpoint, rather than a real world viewed from varied and surprising perspectives. This is the case even where the subjects of the stories appear to have been chosen to provide such perspectives - such as 'Scheherazade’s Last Story’ or 'Master of the Macabre'. In the former we are left wondering how someone supposedly born into a society where Scheherazade’s predicament was real could talk about the Sultan “having an affair”, while in the latter we find ourselves asking why an English don would express himself in mangled and ungrammatical English. This badly damages the credibility of the narrator, whose thin or transparent disguises struggle to sustain an illusion of multiple and varied narrative voices - a necessary illusion if we are to suspend our disbelief and buy into the weird tales the author is trying to sell us.

The one area where the author does write with conviction and plausibility is handling the recurring theme of the relationship of the middle aged, middle class suburban couple, where the reader is repeatedly surfeited with mawkish, cloying, banal and claustrophobic detail. While this might be very well in a certain kind of gratuitously emotional fiction that some might find “life affirming”, this aficionado of imaginative weird fiction found it unendurably tedious. It was this “flabbiness” that finally ruined these volumes for me.

The only reason I went to such length with this review - and that I didn’t talk more about the positive aspects of these volumes - was the lack of other serious critical reviews. Hopefully, potential buyers will read this as a much needed counterweight to the numerous gushing and uncritical reviews. If I’d have read it before my purchase I’d have saved myself £45 and a foot of redundant book shelf space.

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Once upon a time there was a boy who lost his parents, and he tried to find them by writing all the stories in the world."

This book has a similar structure to those ‘Choose your own adventure’ Goosebumps books that I couldn’t get enough of in the 90’s. You are given a choice after each story which dictates the path you follow throughout the 101 stories. It teases you with a map hidden somewhere, but I never came across it. Does it exist? I might have to thumb through all the pages to check, being such a stubborn completionist. There are few paths to some stories and many to others, a secret story, two stories under the same number and an unnamed story you can only get to by not following the rules. I think there are 104 in total. I only got through all the stories on my second attempt by blatant cheating after I was 64 stories deep.

The order in which you read the stories frames how you interpret the ones following, to a degree. There are obvious themes throughout in grief, death and love, but also odd motifs that pop up, like tongues or licking or food.

In another writer’s hands, this endeavour could have come across as a cheap framing device with endless filler material, but that is not the case here. Shearman has a way with words that can draw you into the most bizarre subject matter and keep you there until he is finished with you. He’s also a rather good insult comedian e.g. “droopy-titted cunt” or a line which I can’t stop sniggering at “I said Greek Gods, dipshit."

With over 101 stories, you will likely come across one or two that you feel are written precisely for you, whether you like it or not. Mine was Eruption, which I imagine I’ll want to go back and reread at some point in my life. Or there’s the stories that just feel timely, like The Death Room, which is actually a story about the heartbreak of trying to find a good tradesman. There are stories that are so dark that I don’t really know what to say about them, like Baby Sick or The Bathtub. There are others that I’ve filed away in the ‘What in Fresh Hell Did I Just Read’ category such as The Girl from Ipanema, and of course, ones that made me cry (The Grand Adventure and The Desperate Woman with the Rain Sodden Hair).

I could go on and on about the stories in this collection forever but I’d be here all day. I think Shearman has ruined me for other short story writers. I read someone else’s short-form work and I think “but what could Robert Shearman have done with this? There’s not nearly enough dissonance or darkness or people turning into balloons. Where is the contrast between the mundane and the ridiculous?” Ultimately, if the premise of this work interests you at all, BUY IT.

[Jim Andrew Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most brilliant books I've ever had the pleasure of reading. I call it a single book, even though there are three of them in the set. It's three huge volumes of short stories, but technically it's all one massive book with page numbers that continue from one volume to the next. At the end of every story there are 5 questions related to the story you just finished, and how you answer the question in your mind will take you to the next story, which might be in one of the other volumes. This format has given me one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I've ever had. The "choose your own adventure" narrative structure is both nostalgic for me (I loved those Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid) but it's also a unique approach for a short story collection that creates a new experience with every re-read.

Every story I've read so far has been enjoyable. There are no misses here, they all hit the targets for me. The funny ones cause me to actually laugh out loud, the sad ones make me feel melancholy, the scary ones fill me with dread. Each one is deftly and expertly crafted. Robert Shearman has an amazing talent for giving each story its own voice, it's own unique feel to it.

I am giving this book 5 stars but I haven't even finished it yet. I'm not sure I will *ever* finish it. Every time I start at the beginning I end up following a different path which takes me to different stories. Sometimes I find myself re-reading a story I've already read before, but then I answer the questions differently at the end and choose a new direction. Every time I pick up the book I find something new, and the experience is wonderful.

[Stephen Toman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ok so I didn’t read all 101 stories on this book, but I did read over a quarter of them on my first journey through. Admittedly, i chose to go to the final story for a couple of reasons - so I could loan the book to someone i had been raving about it to, so I could read something else for a while, and so that when I came back to it and had another go, I’d still have loads of new stories to discover. An astounding project. Shearman’s voice continues through each one, whether it’s a comedy, a farce, a weird sci fi thing, a single concept joke, a horror or ghost story. Absolutely amazing. No idea how he did it.

Stories read, this time:
2 Shaggy dog
22 tiny flutter
57 fall of Troy
25 petty vengeance
82 bobbo
16 the 16th step
32 Tom is in the attic
15 swimming pool party
39 good grief
78 famous last words
48 the pillow menu
45 the dark space in the house in the house in the garden at the centre of the world
87 shalt not
6 the disappointing story in the book
53 turbulence
67 the touch of baby stalins skin
60 some unusual facts about laurel and hardy you may enjoy
90 this is why we can’t have nice things
94 brand new shiny shiny
49 and this is where we falter
51and this is how we fall
47 something in the soil
12 canon fodder
83 the masterwork
76 slow handclap for the moronic horde
93 ground beef
73 page turner
101 101 heartbeats
Epilogue (b)

[Ollie Reynolds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, confession: I haven't read every single story within the 3 volumes of We All Hear Stories in the Dark. But that really isn't the point of it. What Robert Shearman has done here is absolutely remarkable; after each story, you're given a handful of choices as to which tale you'll be reading next. Fancy something light? Dark? Want to read about bathtubs? It's your choice.

It's impossible to determine how far you are in the collection at any given time. It's also impossible to determine when and where you'll be kicked out of the experience. It's completely unique, and it's one of the best reading experiences I've had in recent years.

Word of advice though: don't read 'Baby Sick'. I know what you're thinking... When someone tells you not to do something, you only want to do it more. This story is DARK. Shearman hates it, his wife hates it, his editor hates it... I hate it. I should have known better, but if you happen to be reading this review, then I implore you... Don't read 'Baby Sick'.

[Hairy Toes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am of mixed emotion and thought about this trilogy. One one hand, the writing is superb. This is a writer who knows people. Harsh, kind, cruel, tragedy, love, disappointment, it's all here. I cried twice. And it's an interesting premise - the dealing of grief, or, more precisely, what happens and continues to happen after the grief. For the loss of a loved one is not over quickly. The person left creates worlds around the what if. What would you bargain to get the person back? Would you surrender all those stories you created that kept you going, for the dead person to come back to you? A painful dilemma.

My issue is the physical fact of the three books, when one might have done. I struggled to raise the funds for all three - times are harsher than a rat's arse, after all. You need the whole three balanced in front of you when you read, because you have to dip in and out of all volumes. I must admit, it irked me. Maybe i'm shallow.

I might now read a novel by this author, because of the strength of the writing.

[Ed Morland · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've not actually read all the stories in this collection, it having a Choose Your Own Adventure format it kicked me back to the start after I'd read 20 odd of the 101. Those that I've read have been great though; mostly quite dark, always strange and by virtue of the format linked to the previous one if not directly but enough to draw your own conclusions. It's a wonderful set of modern fairy tales which once I started I had trouble putting down.

As to the format itself, it's obviously to a certain extent all theatre and I would have enjoyed just reading those 20 odd stories had they been presented conventionally. But like good theatre the process of choosing which story I would read next, switching from volume to volume and seeing how the subsequent story lived up to or subverted my expectations in choosing it immensely added to the simple text itself and I can't recommend this highly enough.

[Ross Macpherson · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is nothing in fiction like this books (these book?). It is truly a unique collection and a fun conceit, if a bit inconvenient given that I have been travelling multiple times per week this year and have been carting these 3 very large, extremely heavy books, around in a backpack on trains and planes. The stories are funny, delightful, horrifying and almost always at least interesting. It was fun charting a path through and trying to snag every story, although I confess I didn’t re-read any of them, skipping over ones I had encountered before on return visits. I don’t think there is anything particularly profound in either the theme of the work or its stochastic table of contents, although as I said, I enjoyed the conceit, but this is a fine collection of about a decades worth of okay to very good short stories. And they are certainly at least as well written as the game books of my misbegotten youth, coming up on the mean streets.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can I say about this 1,800-page collection of short stories, except that it completely blew a hole in my reading challenge for this year? Shearman has a dandy concept for this 101-story collection - you cannot read them in sequential order. Rather, after the prologue, you are invited to pick one of five stories, and then after each story, one of five, etc. The idea being that no two readers will have the same reading experience. This is pretty fun, if a bit exhausting after a while. As for the stories themselves, they are definitely stories of the macabre, sort of like Twilight Zone episodes but without any twists at the end (most of them end ambiguously, after creating a pretty creepy scenario). Loss features heavily - I was not surprised to hear that Shearman lost both his parents while writing the stories. I read it on and off for almost a year, and I am glad I read it! Also glad I finished it.

[podzo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I say I've read it.
I've actually read about a tenth of the actual book, but that's how this "pick your own adventure" reading works.
Not entirely sure whether the conceit behind these stories actually works : there are 101 stories which have to be read in a certain order to bring back your deaf wife.
However, all the short stories are a brilliant consist collection of weirdness, tenderness, and horror. Seems like a very British collection.
I reckon I've cracked the code for completing all stories in the correct order.
In order to get my monies worth out of the 2000 page 3 volume set, I will certainly dip back in for another run through.

[Gareth · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing achievement, even before the mechanics of creating a matrix of short stories in a Choose Your Own Adventure TM game are taken into consideration. Robert Shearman has a huge imagination and skill at finding the subtlest of phrases and metaphors to illustrate the complex, compromised lives of his characters. Then there's the excitement of never knowing what kind of a story you'll find next - a outright classic horror straight out of Pan Books, a melancholy fantasy, a tale of droll suburban comedy or something else. It's won awards, yet it deserves to be far better celebrated in the mainstream too. The author's magnificent octopus if there ever was one.

[Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. I didn't know short story collections needed a radical overhaul until I started reading this. By turns funny, sad, eerie or beautifully mundane, only two things seem to connect the 101 (!) stories here: the masterful way they're told and the fact that even after you've read 30, 40, 50, 60 of them, you still can't expect to tell how the next one might go. Loved it!
(Tip: the clever reader will make sure they are in possession of several dependable bookmarks before attempting to "crack" this book.)

[Paul Saarma · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superb collection of stories, intricately connected in a myriad of fascinating ways.
The tales are packed with feeling, have varying degrees of weirdness and are utterly engaging.
Those with more restraint than myself will savour a story a day, I gobbled them in handfuls.
My commendations to the writer (Rob Shearman) , illustrator (Reggie Oliver) and publisher
(PS Publishing) for commencing and completing, this mad, ambitious and thoroughly eccentric project.

[Shaun Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I have finished the book, I haven’t read all the stories yet - the nature of it is to jump around and read a random collection of stories.

It’s a fun gimmick but I’d actually prefer to just read it all the way through so I don’t miss any. I set out to do that but now I changed my mind and just want to move on to other books.

The stories are hit and miss, but all in all an excellent collection of weird and wonderful short stories.

[Adrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Think I am going to call this one... individually the stories are great, but... I'm not prepared to read them all again in order to get to the ones I missed. So not sure the concept works.

That does feel harsh though as it's really unlike anything else. Definitely give it a go

[Candy Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gahhhh what's up with the distribution of these books. I want to it get for a mate for Christmas but I can't find just part one for sale and $80 is too much for 3 books she might not like.

[Mark Rough · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic! And now I go again.

[Bookworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m really enjoying this! I had to abandon choosing from the list of suggested stories as it took me right to the end of the book.

[Todd Glaeser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fifteen stories and I’m at the end. Time to start again and make some different choices. Five stars!

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I made the right choices.
I can now put down the book.

[Mugren Ohaly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I chose the wrong path and only read 16 stories.

A creative idea, but not worth the cost or effort.