I found out about this book from Lydia Schoch’s review, and anything Lydia likes is something I’ll give a try. And I’m glad I did. This is a shorty story–5,501 words to be exact–but it’s effective, and it uses all those words to good effect.

The only problem with a story so short is that it’s hard to go into much detail about spoiling the story, so I’ll deliberately keep the plot synopsis vague. It’s about a fishing trip that goes wrong. More generally, it’s in the grand tradition of the ghost story, where people get warned not to do something, do it anyway, and suffer the consequences.

This is the kind of tale you tell around a campfire on a dark night, maybe changing the details here and there to make it better suited to your present location. You don’t need thousands of pages to tell a good scary story; you just need to evoke the feeling of being in a fog and then, when then tension is at its highest, spring something out of it.

The Killer Catfish of Cape Cod is an effective horror short story.