There’s a point in life when you’ve seen so many movies, you can identify the filmmaker’s influences, whether it’s Hitchcock, Fellini, Scorsese or even someone obscure. Although nowadays, the influences seems to fall more along the lines of Bay, Snyder and Whedon. But I digress.

I thought about this while watching JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3, which appears to have been written and directed by people who grew up playing first-person-shooter video games rather than reading books or watching movies. Character goes here, kills this boss, then goes here to kill this boss, but needs this weapon to do it, then levels up so he can kill … and so on.

Before anyone cries out, “What did you expect from a John Wick movie?!?” Well, the first one at least had a semblance of a plot, even if it was derivative of DEATH WISH. Or THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES.

See? Influences.

As a longtime reader, I see literary influences in various authors I read. When it comes to horror writers, I see influences of King (of course), or Koontz, or Poe and Lovecraft. Sometimes Laymon. Sometimes a combination of one or more. Then there are writers who appear out of the ether, fully formed with a distinctively different voice. A writer who acknowledges their influences, but builds upon it to form a new direction. They blaze their own path. Ed Kurtz is one of those writers.

Ed Kurtz is an author not known by the reading public who get their book recommendations from the bestseller list or NPR. And he’s not even known by the horror readers who snatch up whatever Stephen King or Dean Koontz decide to slap a cover on, either. He’s known more by other writers in the horror/crime community, and by discerning readers searching out something … different.

Kurtz doesn’t do his take on the tragic vampire story or the zombie apocalypse shoot-’em-up-we’ve-got-to-find-a-safe-place story that I see redone over and over. He does his own thing. His ideas are different. He writes crime stories and Westerns and horror. And sometimes he writes a combination of two or more of those genres.

Ed Kurtz is also one of those writers on my shortlist that whenever he has something new come out, I instantly have to check it out.

His latest is BLOOD THEY BROUGHT AND OTHER STORIES, a collection of short horror stories, some previously published elsewhere and some original. Several stories are outright horror, while others traverse the fine line between thriller and suspense, and even westerns and gothic-style horror. No matter the genre, though, the author has a knack for writing in the voice of wherever his story is set, whether it’s medieval Europe or 19th-century American West.

Like any collection of stories, there are some the reader will enjoy more than others. Standouts (to me) were “Sawteeth” and “Deathless,” two stories that deal with the dead coming back to life, both different in style and tone, but similar enough in subject that they make complementary bookends. “Sawteeth” in particular held me in white-knuckled attention until the final two lines that brought a smile to my face – more from relief rather than humor.

“Blood They Brought” is a particularly horrifying story that will make you look at garden gnomes differently, and “Corpse Lights” makes for a perfect story to read by flashlight while camping late at night. You know, if you enjoy freaking yourself out.

Not all the stories hit home for me, but much like episodes of BLACK MIRROR, even the ones I didn’t like … I still kind of liked.

BLOOD THEY BROUGHT AND OTHER STORIES is a great introduction to the work of Ed Kurtz. If you want to try a longer work by this uniquely voiced writer, I also highly recommend THE RIB FROM WHICH I REMAKE THE WORLD and SAWBONES. —Slade Grayson

Get it at Amazon.