Alabaster by Caitlin R. Tiernan

I think the only way to sum up this book in a sentence or so is to imagine Coraline, the Sandman, Neverwhere and The Spiderwick Chronicles all mushed together in their creepy otherworldliness and then add a whole lot more scary, creepy and disturbing and maybe then you’ll get Alabaster.

It’s not jumping at shadows kind of creepy but it’s the creepy in the everyday. There are monsters in a run down trailer, one keeps a service station and a few more live in a stately house.
Okay, I’m still not totally sure if the whole collection of shorts stories is like Pan’s Labyrinth and everything’s totally imagined (or not) but it is creepy. The angel and how it tells Dancy what needs to be done and who/what to kill also unnerves me and I wonder if the angel isn’t the demon and everything is deliciously twisted like that.

I kind of wish I could read the collection several times over, if only to make more mental connections between events. Very Sandman-like in that respect.

I would give this book a proper review like thing, but that’d spoil the book a bit. (Never mind I can’t quite convey the tone of it to you.) However, it is a very good short story collection.
The stories make a coherent whole and are very balanced. My two favourite stories of the collection were Bainbridge and Waycross. One was very trippy, the other… wasn’t. There was one story that left you slightly disgusted at the horrendous things humans could do, while another one left you feeling slightly sorry for the monsters Dancy is set upon killing.
And though they definitely tell some of Dancy Flammarion’s story, Alabaster leaves you wanting to fill the holes the stories present to you. I haven’t read Threshold, which is the full-length novel about Dancy, but I probably will, just to see if any more of my questions are answered.

TL;DR – I recommend it. Especially if you like any of the four titles mentioned in my opening sentence.