Invasion of the Body Snatchers but extrapolates the film’s premise. The protagonist is Gritt, sheriff of the Western town of Holden, population 56. One day, the town is invaded by duplicates of some of its residents. These creatures aren’t quite right, and Gritt and the townspeople dispose of them when they attack. Gritt then goes into the desert to search for the creatures’ origin and discovers other Holdens and creatures along the way. The atmosphere here is surreally spooky. The eventual payoff isn’t hard to guess, but it is a fittingly unsettling conclusion to a most unsettling story.

The creatures in the oddly titled “Chopknuckle,” by Noah Pohl also call to mind Body Snatchers. These creatures are what’s left of a group of miners who were trapped underground in an earthquake in the town of, you guessed it, Chopknuckle, 90 years earlier. Not only were the miners buried, but the mansion of the town’s richest man collapsed into the rift on top of the tunnels. The narrator’s girlfriend enters the mansion, looking for something supposedly hidden inside. When she doesn’t emerge, he goes down into the mansion looking for her. Despite the story’s supernatural trappings, it’s more of an exciting adventure tale, especially when the creatures chase after him.

Another oddly named story is “Hachishakusama” by Kylee Shimomura. The title means “eight feet tall” and refers to a modern-day urban legend about a woman that size with claws for hands who abducts children. Jennifer, the story’s protagonist, returns to her native Japan for the first time in decades for her mother’s funeral. She begins seeing the tall woman, who gets progressively closer each time Jennifer spots her. Eventually, dead bodies turn up. This story blends Japanese culture (and the urban legend) and a creepy horror setting.

“The Uninvited” by David Moody is another story that’s more of an adventure than a work of sheer horror. A group of “in-crowd” high schoolers holds a rave on the top floor of an abandoned office building one night. Several nerds crash the party, and one of them unleashes a rat that contains the spirit of a dead Satanist. The now-loosed Satanist goes from body to body, killing and dismembering teenagers. This one requires a healthy suspension of disbelief to accept some of the teens’ thought processes, but it was a lot of fun for those who enjoy this type of horror.

The longest story in Shadow Lab Volume II is “The Retreat” by Gemma Amor. It’s a tale of corporate culture gone off the deep end. Laura, a former Army noncom who left the service under suspicious circumstances, gets a job as a secretary at a major firm. She saved the life of the company’s CEO when he was attacked by a deranged former employee. As a reward, Laura is invited to the company’s annual retreat, supposedly a team-building exercise and a celebration for top-performing employees. The experience goes off the rails quickly. I thought this story had the greatest potential of any tale in “Volume II” for a film adaptation.

Although the stories I’ve described are quite good, Shadow Lab Volume II has almost as many duds as quality stories. “Forty Weeks” by Adam Godfrey describes a woman who becomes a quasi-vampire after being infected by a virus that escaped from a top-secret government project. The only cure requires her to drink the blood of another infected person. The story’s title gives away the somewhat confusing ending. The protagonist of “Insatiable” by Diana Olney is the high-school-aged daughter of a succubus who fears she may have inherited her mother’s worst trait: a taste for human flesh. The author tries to juggle about five different storylines in a 40-page-story and fails at all of them. “Gibbet Hill” by Faith Merino is the name of the town where the protagonist and her husband live with their four-month-old daughter. The hill was the location of the town’s former gallows, which played host to its most infamous resident, a witch who allegedly still haunts the nearby woods, abducting and eating babies. As with the other mediocre stories, pages of confusing material led to a very predictable and poorly staged ending.

 I don’t know how the author arranged the stories in Volume II, because they aren’t organized in any logical order. This is especially unfortunate for readers, since the two most confusing stories, “Gibbet Hill” and “Insatiable,” are the first two in the anthology. The stories improve considerably after that, with some real standouts. “Red Is the Color of Salvation” gives me the creeps every time I think about it, and “The Retreat” is a biting satire combined with a lot of blood. Shadow Lab Volume II is a considerable step down from its predecessor, but the quality of its best stories is enough for me to give the book a three-star rating and a marginal recommendation.

NOTE: The publisher graciously provided me with a copy of this book through NetGalley. However, the decision to review the book and the contents of this review are entirely my own.