This collection of strange and spooky stories was perfect reading for that lazy week between Christmas and New Year, providing a dark antidote to the forced cheeriness of the season. The book was inspired partly by The Twilight Zone and similar television shows. Contributors to the anthology were invited to write about the fantastical, uncanny, absurd, or, as editor Angela Meyer notes, ‘even just the slightly off  ’. Her introduction suggests that speculative and fantastical fiction may appeal, not just for entertainment, but also because it reflects an aspect of reality that may be harder to capture in realist fiction. She argues that our sense that ‘something is just not quite right’ in Australia today is mirrored in these stories.