The Anechoic Chamber And Other Weird Tales by Will Wiles (book review)
I read a great many author collections and this ‘The Anechoic Chamber And Other Weird’ is Will Wiles first and outstandingly different, quirky and wonderful. Wiles was recommended to me a few years ago by the late Christopher Priest and I was delighted to read the earlier novels, ‘The Way Inn’ and ‘Care Of Wooden Floors’, both highly unusual without quite being classifiable as SF or fantasy.
In this collection, five stories can be labelled as SF, five as fantasy and six or seven as nasty horror and yet there are only nine stories here in total. Let me give you the outlines of some of them.
The title story, ‘The Anechoic Chamber’, explains why the narrator requires total silence and, why, despite visiting a laboratory where this is possible, he is unable to achieve it to his satisfaction.
‘Notes On London’s Housing Crisis’ begins like a journalistic article on the subject (Wiles is a journalist in his day job), then goes on to show that it’s being written some decades in the future when most Londoners live in moveable pods.
The fashion for strange broadcast streaming services is satirised in ‘The Meat Stream’. Set at the time of World War I and a little earlier, ‘Tesserae’ is concerned with various supposed experts trying to assemble a bag of minute tesserae from Roman times into faces. ‘A Report To The Imperial Customs Office’ is set wholly in a fantasy world, in which a river boat discovers many strange things in a town upriver.
Just when you think you’ve finished reading this collection, with only ‘The Acknowledgements’ remaining, that turns out to be another very strange story in the guise of the usual acknowledgements which authors make in their books. The writing in all of these is brilliant and convincing. What Wiles demonstrates in every story is his ability to be different, to surprise the reader. Not simply with a twist in the tail, though there is one of those, but with completely original settings and plots. I loved this and hope Wiles will write more strange and un-put-downable stories.
Chris Morgan
February 2026
(pub: Salt, 2025. 163 page paperback. Price: £ 9.99. ISBN 978-1-78463-328-8)
check out website: www.saltpublishing.com/products/the-anechoic-chamber-9781784633288?srsltid=AfmBOorImmr3CDwKLH7JVtyrrYEpwc1T9tNBY9PTPv0uUHm8VbzCy6DG