Thank you Amazon Original Stories & Joe Hill, Stephen Graham, Grady Hendrix, Catriona Ward & Owen King.

I look forward to this collection every year, A team of horror authors who no doubt keep me hooked from start to finish. This collection I read a mix of ebook and audiobook.

This collection was definitely a mixed bag for me. Below are my ratings & details -

Jack knife - Joe Hill
3.5/5 Stars

Provided some spooky moments and it was quite fast paced. Felt I enjoyed but didn't love. Was missing something to take it to the next level but overall was a decent read.

The Indigo Room - Stephen Graham Jones
3/5

Felt this could have been so much creepier, I was a little underwhelmed. Some spooky moments but in some parts I did find myself drifting.

The Blanks - Grady Hendrix
4.5/5

My fav of the whole collection. This one was unsettling and finished off so well. It was creepy in the best ways and the ending did give me shivers!

Night & Day in Misery - Catriona Ward
4/5

See audiobook review for more details

Letter Slot - Owen King
3/5

See audioook review for more details

OVERALL I give this collection a 4/5. Some goodies and some just ok. But a solid horror collection that'll appeal to a range of readers.

Jacknife
I feel like this would have been better if it were a little bit longer and more fleshed out but it was a crazy concept that I enjoyed in a strange way. Would have loved to know more of the trees history.

The indigo room

The start of this was a little bit confusing and honestly it had several moments of confusion to it. It kind of fell flat for me.

The blanks
A pretty simple concept but well done, it was eerie and heartbreaking at the end.

Night and day in misery
Im not sure this was horror so much as simply sad, haunting maybe but not horror. I did enjoy it though.

Letter Slot

This is a good lesson in being careful what you wish for. The ending was surprising and kind of sad. Probably my favorite of the collection.

I loved all of these. However, Night and Day in Misery was by far my favorite. All of the stories were engaging and fun to read. I highly recommend them.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for both an E-ARC and an ALC of this short story collection. The overall collection was 4 stars for me and I highly recommend it.

I found the narrators on all 5 stories to be excellent. The voices were clear. The inflection in their voices during times of tension was spot on and performed very well.

Jackknife by Joe Hill--5 Stars
This story was fantastic. The story opens with a 30-something professor who is in the process of a divorce. He’s justified his flirtatious texts with a female student one too many times and is on the outs with his wife. The university that he works for has him under review and he’s living in a pay-by-the week hotel. Life’s a mess for our main character. When he opts for a walk in the woods chaos breaks out.

The Indigo Room by Stephen Graham Jones—1 Stars
A woman attends a meeting at her work and sees coworkers without their heads. This pulled me and and thereafter I was completely lost. I have no idea what was occurring in the story nor why her the character’s son was pulled into the story. I was simply confused.

The Blanks by Grady Hendrix—5 Stars
This story was incredibly creepy. I’m a bit worried that if I comment on various aspects of the story that I’ll spoil the overall plot. That said, a family heads up north to enjoy time by the ocean and to escape urban chaos. Instead, strange beings interrupt their family time and end the evening with a night of terror.

Night & Day In Misery by Catriona Ward—4.5 Stars
This story had both paranormal aspects but also pulled at my Mama heart strings. A grieving woman decides to head to a hotel to feel closer to her son. I found it to be creepy and unsettling but also very moving.

Letter Slot by Own King—3.5 Stars
If you could seek vengeance on others and right wrongs via a postal request; would you do it? This story explores what lengths we’re driven to when we want to extend the life and preservation of our loved ones.

I was excited to get this to read the stories by Joe Hill and Owen King, mostly. I have also never read anything by Stephen Graham Jones, so I was interested in his story as well. I have never heard of Catriona Ward, but I am interested in looking into her books.

Anyways, this was my first time reading a collection of Amazon original stories and some were better than others.


JACKKNIFE by Joe Hill
4 stars

I love Joe Hill’s books. I feel like he’s a more quirky version of his dad’s books. This story was good. I was intrigued the whole time, but felt like it ended abruptly.

THE INDIGO ROOM by Stephen Graham Jones
3 stars

I’ve never read anything by this author before, so I wasn’t sure what his writing style was like.

I’m not sure if this is the same as his other books, but for some reason I found myself getting lost in the middle. I thought the elevator scene was good, but between the opening scene and that scene it lost me a little.

THE BLANKS by Grady Hendrix
4 stars

I actually have tried to read a couple of books by this author, and I haven’t finished any of them. This one was interesting and sad. I feel like it’s a story of what people will sacrifice to keep up with the Joneses and stay in a certain bracket of society.

NIGHT AND DAY IN MISERY by Catriona Ward
4 stars

This one made me so sad. I thought she wrote it in a way that I felt how sad the main character was. I enjoyed it, but it was heartbreaking.

LETTER SLOT by Owen King
3 stars

Listen, the Kings…I have had a loving relationship with the master since 2020. I love the way all of them write, but they just can't keep their political opinions to themselves, and it just ruins it for me. They could be writing politics that I agree or disagree with, it doesn’t matter, I don’t want to know your opinion. I get that enough already in real life.

That being said, I thought it was an interesting story and premise about morals. Would you allow someone else to suffer if you got ahead? The ending left a little to be desired, but overall, it kept me interested.

Not a bad collection of stories. I think average 4 stars.

Overall, this Amazon Original Stories collection is an uneven but worthwhile read that offers a mix of suspense, horror, and emotional depth. While a few stories missed the mark—particularly The Indigo Room, which felt scattered and underwhelming—others like The Blanks and Night and Day in Misery stood out with compelling characters, chilling tension, and emotional resonance. Joe Hill’s Jackknife delivered solid creep-factor, and though Letter Slot lagged in pacing, it still offered eerie charm. Despite some common horror pitfalls (including a frustrating trend of dog deaths), the collection kept me engaged and gave me a few memorable reads.

Hmmmm….some of these short stories were good and some were just bleh. Nothing exciting. Kind of disappointed and glad I didn’t pay for it tbh. Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for this early copy for read and review

While I’m not sure I would call any of these short stories straight horror stories, they all have creepy elements. As with any collection of stories there were some I enjoyed more than others, with my favorites being Night and Day in Misery by Catriona Ward and The Blanks by Grady Hendrix. But as if often the case for me with short stories, while I enjoyed them I’m often left wanting more, for the stories and the worlds they take place in to be expanded upon. While highly enjoyable, they also feel like teases of a greater ‘what could be’. Definitely recommend fans of these authors check out this collection. I’d like to thank Amazon Original Stories and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review an eARC of The Shivers Collection.

Thank you to NetGalley and Amazon Original Stories for the opportunity to read Jackknife by Joe Hill.

This is the first of five short stories in the collection titled: The Shivers.

Dennis Lange is dealing with the aftermath of a scandal he was involved in. Hoping for resurgence, Dennis sells a dark story regarding a tree. He is distraught and distracted and makes decisions in haste… will it cost him his life?

The Indigo Room by Stephen Graham Jones.

This is the second of five short stories in the collection titled: The Shivers.

Jennifer is having a bad day at work and the day worsens when her son is dropped off at her job unexpectedly. Jennifer has to determine what is real before her eyes and measure the dangerous circumstances accordingly.

The Blanks by Grady Hendrix

This is the third of five short stories in the collection titled: The Shivers.

Rachel and her family spend the summer at Jeckle Island. Their time together seems perfect until it isn’t. Her son is in danger… what will she do?

Night and Day in Misery by Catriona Ward.

This is the fourth of five short stories in the collection titled: The Shivers.

Stella is haunted by the passing of her son and husband. Eight years later, Stella finds herself at the hotel her son and husband visited before their deaths. Her sleep is interrupted by unsettling images of both her husband and son. The visions increase in severity to the point where Stella can’t determine reality verses supernatural.

This story stood out to me the most out of all five stories. It is dark and depicts the horrors of grief.

Letter Slot by Owen King.

This is the final story of all five short stories in the collection titled: The Shivers.

A teenager, sick with worry over the demise of his mother, decides to write a letter of all his concerns. He then decides to slip it in the mail slot of an abandoned house. He is shocked when he receives a response from the recipient of the house and the offer to help his mother. However, the cost may be too steep for him to pay.

While I enjoyed a few of these short stories, I wouldn’t classify any of them as horror.
I was mostly enjoying Jackknife until the ending. I felt like this story could have been longer.
The Blanks made me angry at the main characters because their reasoning for doing what they did was nonsense. Maybe that’s the reaction the author was going for?
The Letter Slot was very intriguing and I would’ve loved for it to have been longer as well.

Jackknife - 3 stars
Not a bad story but there really wasn't anything scary or creepy until the end. The writing style was all right, it kept me engaged throughout this short story even when I despised the main character. Trigger warning for animal death.

The Indigo Room - 2 stars
I think this book solidified that Stephen Graham Jones isn't an author for me when I can't even enjoy a story this short. The best part was the elevator scene but the rest felt super wordy for no reason. It's like the author has to cram as many words as possible into a sentence to finally make his point. I've heard so many great things about this author but sadly I don't think he's for me.

The Blanks - 5 stars
I can always rely on Grady to deliver a great horror book. I might not have enjoyed every single book he's written but this was great. I loved the setting and was legitimately freaked out by the blanks. The ending was sad but horrific in its own way, I honestly wish this was a whole 400 page book.

Night and Day in Misery - 5 stars
I knew I loved her writing but this short little story blew me away. I had heart palpitations and was dang near in tears. It was engaging and beautifully written, I need more of this story please.

Letter Slot - 2 stars
I'm not sure if this was my first or second least favorite short story in the collection but regardless I didn't enjoy it. Nothing about this was scary to me and I thought the kid was a real POS at the end.

The Shivers Collection is made up of five punchy short stories from some of the biggest names in modern horror.
For my review, I will share a sentence from each that defines the story for me or that I most connected with.
Jackknife (Joe Hill) - “He felt she owed him a fuck”

The Indigo Room (Stephen Graham Jones) - “If the meeting had been any more excruciatingly boring, Jennifer was pretty sure her soul would have sublimated up from the hair follicles of her scalp, transubstantiated into the refrigerated air of the office, and been recycled into . . . she didn’t know: Accounting up on the fourteenth floor? The parking garage under the building?”

The Blanks (Grady Hendrix) - “They shouldn’t have stayed out here past the end of the season” giving off very “The Summer People” by the great Shirley Jackson vibes

Night and Day in Misery (Catriona Ward) - “There isn’t enough pain in the world to drown this out”

Letter Slot (Owen King) - “When he dreamed of the future, he didn’t fantasize about being wealthy or famous. He just thought how nice it would be not to worry.”

This collection, as a whole, is a solid 4.75/5. All 5 stories were awesome and l'll go into a little detail on each below, but I highly recommend these stories if you haven't checked them out yet.

Jackknife by Joe Hill kicked things off with a man removing a knife from a mysterious tree. This story is super wacky and does some really cool, really dark stuff. I enjoyed the hell out of it. Solid 4.5/5 from me.

Stephen Graham Jones was next with The Indigo Room. This story was an excellent touch on paranoia. SGJ managed to make a mundane office setting quite terrifying. This one was a bit of a mind-fuck, but it's great, as all SGJ's work is. He doesn't miss, after all. 4.5/5.

Grady Hendrix followed with The Blanks. This was, hands down, the scariest of the 5 and my favorite as well. A family is on a beach trip when their son sees a "blank." There's some history here we barely scratch the surface of... a town knowing some mysteries... idk man I want a full novel of this though, it was fucking awesome. 5/5.

Catriona Ward's Night And Day In Misery was our penultimate story, and it was the saddest of the bunch.
An excellent little tale that had the creep factor, but was definitely the emotional punch of the bunch. I really enjoyed it. 4.5/5.

Last, but definitely not least, Owen KIng wrapped things up with Letter Slot. This story was wild and such an awesome concept. I feel like I can't say too much about this one without giving a lot away, but it rocked. 4.75/5.

The nitty-gritty: An uneven but solid bunch of stories, I was ultimately won over by three that were very good indeed.

This is my first time reading a collection of Amazon original stories, and overall it was a fun experience. Below I’ll give a brief review and rating of each of the five stories. Let me know which ones sound good to you!

JACKKNIFE by Joe Hill
4 stars

This was a very creepy story about a man who encounters a killer tree, and I liked it a lot.

Dennis Lange, a college professor, is in all sorts of trouble when he is forced to move out of his house after his wife catches him sexting with one of his students at school. He rents an Airbnb, and while taking a walk one day, he encounters a strange sight: a huge sycamore that appears to be halfway wrenched out of the ground. Embedded in its trunk is an old jackknife, and strange phrases are carved into the tree next to the knife. With a misguided sense of nostalgia, he decides to remove the knife and takes it home.

The next day, Dennis spots the tree again—but it has moved. And the next day, the same thing happens. Trees can’t walk, can they? Then why does it feel like the tree is stalking him? Dennis is about to find out the hard way.

Hill does a great job of building suspense around the tree, and I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see what would happen. He gives Dennis a nice backstory, painting him as a guy who got himself into trouble, but it’s not completely his fault. The ending was a bit abrupt and “out there,” but up to that point I was terrified!

THE INDIGO ROOM by Stephen Graham Jones
2 stars

This story was not good, unfortunately. I was very surprised because I usually love the author’s work. 

The story takes place in a corporate setting. Jennifer is a manager for the company, and during a meeting, she begins to see odd things in the conference room. When the lights go down, she thinks she sees one of her coworkers without a head. Later, an accident in the elevator leads her to believe she might be seeing the future.

The author’s scattered writing style is present here, but it doesn’t work at all in this setting. I was both bored and confused while reading this story, and it wasn’t until the end, when Jennifer’s son Cole takes on a very emotional role, that things picked up. It almost felt like Jones knew the ending before he started writing but couldn't figure out how to get there in a way that made sense.

THE BLANKS by Grady Hendrix
5 stars

This was my favorite of the bunch, and it was a really good one!

Rachel and her husband have been bringing their two kids to Jeckle Island for years. Every summer they move into their Jeckle Island house for two months of sunny beaches, drinks and cookouts with the neighbors. Everyone on Jeckle Island knows about the Blanks, and they all know the rules: if you see a Blank, you ignore it and look away. You pretend it isn’t there. Even the kids have the rules drilled into them.

But one day, Rachel’s young son Callum sees a Blank attack one of their neighbors—and the Blank sees Callum. Rachel is terrified, because she knows exactly what comes next…

The beauty of this story is the way Hendrix creates unease right from the beginning. You have a happy family spending an idyllic summer at the beach, but the reader knows something is off. The author never explains what the Blanks are, but leaves it up to the reader’s imagination, which makes them even scarier. I also loved the way everyone is in complete denial about the Blanks and what they do. It was simply chilling!

NIGHT AND DAY IN MISERY by Catriona Ward
4 stars

I loved this one too! This is a more serious, heartbreaking story that the others, about a woman whose husband and son died in a car accident, and she’s decided to end her life, hoping to be reunited with her son.

Stella is retracing the steps her ex husband and son took before they ended up in the lake, dead from drowning. She's come to the same hotel they spent the night in, and Stella has plans to visit the fateful scene of their accident and join her son in the watery depths. But then a boy appears in her hotel room, a boy that looks like her son, but older. And he's trying to tell her something important.

Catriona Ward’s writing is so good, and I felt for the main character Stella, who has so much grief in her past and can only see one solution to ending it. This story has lots of potential triggers, including spousal abuse, alcoholism, death of a child and suicide ideation. There’s also a Sixth Sense vibe that I really loved. 

LETTER SLOT by Owen King
3 stars

This took a while to get going and I was bored for the first half of the story. Maybe not the best pacing for a short story, just saying. A young boy and his mother are struggling to make ends meet, when the boy comes across an almost magical way to turn their luck around.

Letter Slot had some creepy moments, but the ending disappointed me, and so it was just an OK read.

I also want to mention that in several of these stories there are dogs who are killed off, and once again I’m wondering why writers think animal cruelty is necessary for a good horror tale. I’m at the point where whenever there’s a dog in the story, I expect it’s going to meet a bad end. Sigh.

But aside from that, I'm glad I took a chance on this collection. It was a nice change of pace to read shorter works of fiction!

I’m usually not a big thriller/horror fan, but these collections of stories was a big hit!!! They were creepy, but twisted and all the feelings that keep you seconding guessing it all!! These are all a must read!!!

Thank you NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review!!!

Jackknife:

As an avid fan of Joe Hill, I was pleasantly surprised to find out he released a new short story as part of the Shivers collection. In this one, a jackknife pulled out of a dying sycamore tree has deadly consequences.

This author can write about a spoon and have it be interesting yet hauntingly eerie as he pulls you into his world. In such a limited number of pages, he constructed a chilling atmosphere with three-dimensional characters and a nightmarish tale. As always, there is not a flaw in sight, and I rate this one a solid five stars.

The Indigo Room:

This author took the mundane office setting and turned it into a surreal nightmare with Final Destination vibes. We are thrown straight into the mind of the protagonist, chronicled as if in a trancelike state. The ending was done outstandingly, leaving the reader satisfied while the characters are still in motion, which is an impressive feat in itself. Three and a half stars.

The Blanks:

This was a memorable, dread inducing story that left me yearning for more. It was tragic and terrifying. The author did a perfect job of describing the creatures while still leaving it to the reader's imagination. This will pull you in and leave its mark. The atmosphere in a secluded location held an ominous feeling, building up to the very end. There is so much that can be explored here, and I can't help but beg the author for more in the form of a full novel. Five perfect stars.

Night and Day in Misery:

This was a tearjerker that deals with loss in the most brutal of ways. While this was paranormal and not exactly horror, this still fits perfectly in with the collection, and there was a haunting undertone felt throughout. This author wrote this flawlessly, and while it's a love or hate type story, no one can deny the talent and power of her writing. Four Stars.

Letter Slot:

While I am still coming to terms with the ending, this was a brilliant story of self-preservation and morals. This one really makes you think about what you would do given the situation. It lingers, and it pulls at your conscience. Written by a talented hand from a talented family, you can't go wrong here. Four Stars.

Thank you, Netgalley and Amazon Original Stories, for this digital copy.

I was sadly disappointed in the Joe Hill story. It had all the hallmarks of sending us in one direction, and then didn't follow through. I honestly thought the story had been cut off before the ending and when I realized that was the end I was sorry I wasted my time.

However, the other three stories were great, and I think were increasingly better as we went along. The story by Stephen Graham Jones was clever, but I wish it had been pushed just a little further.

Grady Hendrix's story was really timely, about seeing what you want to see and the consequences of not doing something sooner. I cried over Catriona Ward's story. Owen King's was just about perfect.

Aside from Joe Hill's story, the whole collection was pretty solid.

Five short stories by five celebrity authors that are sure to keep you talking about and sharing this collection. When asked to recommend a book or author, I typically recommend anthologies or collections such as this one. Readers are treated to stories that demonstrate an author's skills as the stories may be short but they are never short of impact. These five authors are already some of my favorites so it's easy for me to recommend these 5 star stories. Read, review, share, repeat.

Nice collection if stories by some of my favorite writers. Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read this interesting collection

This thriller-horror series delivered a chilling, emotional ride. Each part added a new layer of tension—some stories slow and creeping, others sharp and unsettling. There was heartbreak, confusion, and moments that genuinely got under my skin. The emotional depth, especially around the children and their choices, made it more than just scares—it felt personal and haunting.

The final story raised the biggest question: was the resolution real, or something imagined? That uncertainty left a lingering unease, the kind that stays with you. Not every answer was given, but maybe that’s the point. This series doesn’t just want to scare you—it wants to haunt you. And it does.