There is no greater author of weird tales alive today than John Whitbourn, and
"Waiting For A Bus" is perhaps the eeriest of all his short stories. It has won a slew of awards and if you read it on Christmas Eve with the lights turned low, I think you'll see why. And after that, when the goosebumps go down and you can steel yourself to get up from your chair, take a look at the rest of the
Binscombe Tales series.
Here is the review that one of my friends gave after I recommended the series to him:
"The Binscombe Tales are quite simply phenomenal, and I do not use the term lightly. It's all set in a quiet, definitively English village surrounded by a council estate in the suburbs outside London. The series is very difficult to categorize. It starts off as an almost conventional series of ghost stories, sometimes genuinely frightening and most disturbing, but increasingly becomes more and more mysterious, odd, humorous, and deeply intriguing.
"The stories are independent, but should be read sequentially as there is an underlying theme to the entire work. They are nested stories; theoretically each short story stands alone, but there is an overarching narrative that links them and forms a story in itself, which for me was even more interesting than any individual tale. They make a genuinely brilliant whole. The entire work (and world) is quintessentially English. It's just so marvellous; it has to make my top ten favourite books list."
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