The Anechoic Chamber

Series

Name: Salt Modern Stories   Number: 12

Synopsis

‘Funny, chilling, intriguing: each tale offers something different from the last, and the overall result is like listening to a perfectly made album.’ —Mark Watson

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.

Praise for this Book

‘There aren't many writers out there as entertaining as Will Wiles. He has a real gift for manoeuvring between the quotidian and the truly sinister, often within a single page. These brilliantly executed stories offer delicious bite-size portions of his unsettling wit and eye for the killer detail (sometimes literally). Funny, chilling, intriguing: each tale offers something different from the last, and the overall result is like listening to a perfectly made album.’ —Mark Watson

Praise for Previous Work

‘Wiles is basically Kafka, if Kafka had spent more time in British hotels and pubs.’ —David Baddiel

‘Will Wiles both re-invents and murders the London novel, in a spectacular act of evil, surgical intensity.’ —Warren Ellis

‘A very funny novel combining schadenfreude and belly laughs. Just don’t let Wiles flat-sit for you.’ —Independent

‘Funny, beguiling and quietly profound; a wonderfully well-crafted debut.’ —TLS

‘Dark and funny in equal measures … a debut as crisp, slick and polished as a well-cared-for wooden floor.’ —Scotland on Sunday

‘A nicely turned satire on the notion that the path to spiritual contentment lies in a pristine set of polished wooden floorboards … Wiles has an eye for beauty, but an even more impressive eye for ugliness … a novel full of impeccably stylish writing.’ —The Guardian

‘Wiles is a talent to watch.’ —The Spectator

‘The book is joy unconfined: the reader is sucked along unstoppably, but glorying too with uncomfortable recognition. Fabulous in every sense.’ —Spectator

‘Wiles takes us deep into a subtly altered London at the mercy of the malign forces of gentrification, and seemingly in the hands of a mysterious tech maven whose new app can track every user at all times … an eerie and sometimes pretty sharp satire on the more sinister commodifications of modern life.’ —Daily Mail

‘Plume’s cast of semi-sinister clowns aren’t the most sympathetic, but it’s the suffocating, Ballardian sense of place and mental and physical deterioration that Wiles, a design and architecture writer when not a novelist, does so horribly well. Plume is about a man trapped in a prison of his own making who endlessly gets nowhere at all.’ —Financial Times