Mondays are always horrible, but they can be made tolerable by reading some horror fiction.  Hence, “Horrible Monday,” in which Fantasy Literature reviews horror fiction to help you make it through the day. It’s the day that’s terrible, not the fiction!

Until I read Indignities of the Flesh I hadn’t heard of Bentley Little, although he’s been published in magazines like Cemetery Dance, which I used to read. Indignities of the Flesh is an anthology containing ten of Little’s surrealistic horror tales. One, “Valet Parking,” is original to this collection.

Bentley Little provides a paragraph before each story, talking about the inspiration. Not surprisingly, many of his inspirations for horror stories are things that frighten him or creep him out; clowns, for instance, in “Rodeo Clown”; valets in “Valet Parking.” Some, like “Documented Miracles,” sprang from experiences Little had as a journalist.

This anthology is a fast read, because many of the short stories are truly short. Little has mastered the tightrope act of being horrifying and funny at the same time, and these stories demonstrate that. Several are just horrifying, and a couple are downright sweet.

My favorite was “Looney Tune,” which is based on a southern California urban legend. A boy and his parents are on the run from a well-funded group of animators—yes, animators. The boy’s father has been blacklisted as an animator, but he still draws. The family moves from town to town, state to state, carrying with them a strange metal cylinder the boy calls “Heaven.” The ending is not much of a twist for people who know a little bit about Anaheim, California, and the history of American animation, but the characters are strange and well-developed in a short space and the loyalty of the family, not to mention some rather strange personal customs, makes this wonderfully surreal.

“Documented Miracles” is a strange and powerful story about faith, skepticism and cynicism –and the difference between those last two. Gregory has reluctantly followed his wife on a tour to South America, to meet with a “psychic surgeon.” I thought I knew where this one was going. I was wrong.

“Happy Birthday, Dear Tama” was the least successful story in the collection for me. I have to say, though, that once you’ve opened a horror story with dead puppies, you’ve set the bar pretty high. The mystery of Tama’s brother, or the monster in the attic, gets lost in the antics of Tama’s zany family. The story is supposed to be creepy, horrifying fun, but Little just tries too hard. I was more entertained by Little’s explanation of the genesis of this story.

“Valet Parking” didn’t really work for me either.  An interesting exercise doesn’t always make a successful story, and that’s the case here.

Many of the stories involve children, who feel helpless in the face of evil that adults either can’t recognize or won’t fight. In “Black Ladies,” Little explores a generational curse and its impact on a family. “Pinata” and “Gingerbread” both follow children who are confronted with the uncanny in their own homes. In “Pinata,” the question is whether the surviving family members can pull together in the face of evil; while “Gingerbread” explores the feelings of loss a young man experiences when his grandmother dies. Of course, it’s not that simple.

“Rodeo Clown” is the most straightforward story in the book. The suspense is not whether there is evil, only when it will act, and whether Patty, the wife of a rodeo-rider, will be able to withstand it. What separates this from other run-of-the-mill evil monster stories is the small and perfect details Little gives us about bull-riding.

The most intriguing story was “Brushing,” an exploration of how an obsession can bind a stalker and his victim in a fatal entanglement:

“On Friday, she went to Sav-On and then to Walgreen’s, looking at toothbrushes. There were so many to choose from! Blue ones and green ones and yellow ones and red ones. Brushes with long handles and curved handles and tapered handles, with hard bristles or soft bristles or bristles of different lengths and colors. She had never noticed before how beautiful and finely designed most toothbrushes were, a perfect marriage of form and function.”

“Even the Dead” is a sad, sweet tale of two friends, one of whom isn’t alive.  There is no trick or twist ending, just the inevitable progression of a situation. It’s done well.

This sampler of stories is a good way to spend a few hours, if you like horror, and, for me, a fine introduction to a horror writer I hadn’t read previously.

If you start your week off with a horror novel, maybe you’ll feel like your life really isn’t so bad after all. There’s not much worse than being trapped on a ship full of vampires…

Carpathia by Matt Forbeck

So it’s April 1912, and here I am aboard R.M.S. Titanic, on her maiden voyage. By heaven, she’s a lovely ship! Big, too. But I’m a little worried we’re getting rather close to that iceberg. Oh I say, we’ve struck it! Not to worry, old man, everyone knows this ship is unsinkable. What’s that? We’re sinking anyway? Dash the luck! Off to the lifeboats then. What do you mean, there’s no more room? Blimey. Rest assured I’ll write a strongly worded letter to the White Star Line about this! Alas, I suppose there’s nothing for it but to dress in my evening best, order a brandy, and prepare to die like a sir. Could be worse, I suppose. At least we aren’t being attacked by vampires. What’s that? We are being attacked by vampires! Of all the bloody cheek!

You could read Matt Forbeck’s Carpathia a lot like this: as an extended sketch rather than a novel. Forbeck is a writer with a background in comics and games, and he writes books with a sensibility straight from the movies, which makes him easy reading for people who don’t usually read for entertainment.

Of all horror’s subgenres, I must confess I like vampire fiction the least. Writers of vampire fiction, it seems, limit themselves to one of two very basic story ideas: Lawful Good Battles Chaotic Evil, or Bad Romance. The former was the ball that Bram Stoker started rolling all these years ago, while the latter is what’s hot for a lot of audiences right now. While I suppose it’s good to see writers like Forbeck coming along in the post-Twilight era to save vampire fiction from emo sparkle-boys and reclaim it for the gorehounds among us, the fact remains that I draw a blank when it comes to examples of vampire fiction that offer anything in the way of satisfying, lasting storytelling depth. Vampire fiction has produced a lot of splatterific entertainment, but rarely any real literary achievement.

Well, so what. As long as the arterial spray is flowing freely, screw art, let’s dance… Read the rest. 

The Tulpa  by Ardath Mayhar

Araminta Palomer is the daughter of an elderly wealthy businessman and his second wife. Minta has been sheltered for all her life, living in the family mansion which is surrounded by high walls and patrolling Doberman Pinschers. She has a governess and is driven to town only rarely for shopping. Because she’s lonely, Minta creates an imaginary friend — an egg-shaped furry creature who loves her. Prophetically, she names him Willbe and she imagines him with sharp needle-like teeth because she’s got a really nasty older stepbrother.

At first, Willbe is the perfect companion; he’s warm and furry and sleeps next to Minta at night. The problems start when Willbe begins to manifest as a real creature whenever Minta feels threatened — and he’s not afraid to use those teeth. When Minta is kidnapped and Willbe steps in to protect her, the police start asking questions. Most people can’t see Willbe, but the governess, who has spent some time in Tibet, recognizes the creature as a Tulpa. She understands that Minta has summoned the tulpa, but she doesn’t know how to get rid of him, and he’s gradually getting more dangerous as he resists Minta’s control. He racks up several murders by the end of the story… Read the rest.

Act of Love by Joe R. Lansdale

Originally published in 1981, Joe R. Lansdale’s Act of Love is a serial-killer thriller. A year before Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon took us into the mind of a sadistic serial killer, Lansdale was doing it, giving us chapters in the point of view of a necrophiliac, sadistic, misogynist cannibal as he terrorizes the city of Houston, Texas.

Act of Love is set in the 1980s and follows the murders committed by the Houston Hacker. The “Hacker” was given his name by a local tabloid, and he is corresponding with them, taunting the police in the manner of Jack the Ripper. The story also follows Marshall Hanson, a black detective, and Joe Clark, his trainee partner, as they investigate the killings. Hanson has a house in a suburb of Houston, a teenaged daughter and a smart, lovely wife, Rachel. In other words, he has a lot to lose… Read the rest.

Graham Masterton is relatively unknown in the United States except among the horror cognoscenti. Although he’s written or edited more than 20 books, he is mostly known in his native England. He can write a slick little work of horror like House of Bones and make it haunt you no matter where you live, though; there’s something about the idea of being pulled right through the walls or floor of your home that can make anyone shudder. It would be nice if he were better known in these parts.

Basilisk is not the place to start reading Masterton, however. One big problem is that, for reasons known only to himself, Masterton chose to set Basilisk primarily in Philadelphia. It’s hard for a writer in Britain to get American idioms right, and vice versa. Language errors, even very small ones, and geographic anomalies can pull an American reader out of the story. Masterton doesn’t have America down cold, and it hurts his book.

The problems don’t end there. True, there is an interesting concept behind this book. Nathan Underhill is a zoologist who is convinced that creatures like gryphons, sphinxes and basilisks really existed in prehistoric times. He wants to breed them again now, because he believes they will be a source for embryonic stem cells he can use to cure diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. But if there is any explanation for why mythological creatures would be a good source for such cells, I missed it. The implication is that a creature that is a mixture of, say, reptile and mammal has more cells capable of differentiating into any other type of cell than does an animal of a single biological class, but this is never spelled out.

Unfortunately, despite having spent nearly three million dollars on research, Nathan’s most recent attempt to breed a gryphon has failed; it decomposed in its shell and was born with most of its body already necrotized. Nathan’s program at the Philadelphia Zoo will therefore be dismantled and he will have to either give up his dream or find someone new to fund it.

He learns, however, of another researcher who may have actually bred a basilisk. This researcher is the mysterious and unconventional Dr. Christian Zauber, the owner of a local nursing home. Nathan and his wife, Grace, break into the nursing home at night to find the basilisk – and it does indeed exist, as Grace learns the hard way. While the basilisk does not kill her with its gaze, as legend would have it, it does manage to put her into a deep coma. Zauber agrees to tell Nathan how to revive Grace, but only at a price: Nathan must assist Zauber in his experiments. Between Zauber’s use of magic and Nathan’s knowledge of biology, Zauber reasons, they should be able to create a fully functional creature. But there is a high price to such creation: a sacrifice is required. And Nathan is not prepared to become a murderer, even to achieve his life’s dream – or to save his wife’s life.

The plot moves inexorably from science to magic as it moves from West to East. In Poland, where Nathan follows Zauber to attempt to extract from him the secret to saving his wife’s life, Zauber’s abilities switch from those of a scientist to those of a magician. He can, for instance, move with uncanny speed, now here, now across the room. And he is not the only one who deals with ancient magic; Nathan is assisted by a znakharka, a sort of Polish witch, who gives him a charm bag that might keep him safe from Zauber’s magic.

This strange mixture of science and magic, of biology and myth, seems to careen out of control as the book nears its conclusion. If you cannot swallow the initial conceit that mythological creatures might have once existed and could exist again, if we could but figure out the science of selectively breeding them, you will most certainly not tolerate the notion that magic is necessary to the brew. Horror readers will find better chills and thrills elsewhere.

Many countries, including the United States, house their poor in such unpleasant places that they are rethinking the way to provide housing assistance for them. Numerous high rise facilities have been demolished, like the infamous Cabrini Green in Chicago or Atlanta’s Bowen Homes, and replaced with mixed-income housing projects. In England, they are called council estates. High rises are even more problematic there, for England has never taken much to the skyscraper, at least as a place to live. So it’s not surprising that there are places like The Grove, with an abandoned high rise in the center and flats surrounding it in a concentric pattern. Such is the nature of The Grove in Gary McMahon’s The Concrete Grove, because that’s all you see there: no trees, no grass, no flowers, only concrete.

Hailey lives in the Grove with her mother. The place scares her, because she is not accustomed to it. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but her father lost the family’s money and committed suicide, and now they’re stuck living on as best they can. Hailey yearns for a place she can be on her own, and for someone, or something, to save her. She often heads for the Needle, the abandoned skyscraper in the middle of the Grove, for some private time. It isn’t exactly a pleasant place, being filled with trash and unpleasant smells, but it’s a place she can grab some time for herself. One day after school, she happens upon a flock of hummingbirds in the room she usually frequents in the Needle. She is enraptured, especially because hummingbirds are not native to England; she’s never seen one before. But these hummingbirds seem to be messengers of a sort, from a literal grove that existed before the Concrete Grove existed, and right there, in Chapter One, unpleasant things begin happening.

McMahon quickly introduces us to another viewpoint character, Tom, who likes to run to keep in shape, but also to escape from his wife. It’s an especially sad marriage. His wife is a paraplegic, having been in a automobile accident while on her way to a tryst with a paramour. She no longer makes the slightest effort to be a wife in any way, not even leaving her bed any longer, simply eating herself to death. One day — that same day Hailey had her encounter with the hummingbirds — Tom is out running near the Grove when he comes across Hailey, crumpled by the side of the road. He rescues her from what appears to be a faint, and takes her home to her mother, Lana. Lana and Tom have an immediate physical attraction to each other, an attraction that they refuse to deny.

But the Grove has something to say about that, and things continue to get darker as this very black novel continues. We learn that Lana is in deep with the Grove’s resident loan shark, who is as brutal – no, actually more brutal – than one can imagine.  McMahon does not spare his readers, but he doesn’t need to overwhelm us with gory details.  He tells us just enough so that our own imaginations soar into a darkness we never thought lived there, seeing in our mind’s eye what he only hints at. It takes a true master to make a reader paint the picture after he has merely drawn the outline.

McMahon hints at a deeper story than the horrific picture he draws, though, and the reader is left wishing that he had filled in more of the details. One guesses that he is attempting to use the trope of an oak grove as the home of ancient powers that are insensible to humans, seeing them, if at all, only as tools.  The Concrete Grove seems to be built over one of these old places of power. It transforms the older grove rather than replacing it, and McMahon seems to want us to see that the transformation has warped those powers. This would have been a better story if McMahon had done more with the deep background. Desperation, frustration and terror lurk in the pages of The Concrete Grove, and one wishes for an explanation. Publicity for the book states that this is the first novel in a trilogy, so maybe we’ll learn more as the trilogy goes on.

But then, perhaps the lack of a reason is all the reason for the horror McMahon means for us to see for now. Hopelessness emanates from every page; no character seems to have a way out of the awfulness in which he or she lives. McMahon’s horror is existential as well as experiential, and it’s hard to say which is the more terrifying.

First novels by new authors are like surprise packages that come in the mail: you don’t know what you’ll find inside, not really, even if there was advance hype. Sometimes you find something so unappealing you wonder that anyone could have thought it was for you. Other times you get a teenaged sociopath who’s fighting hard not to become a serial killer despite his deep-seated wish to create dead bodies, and then you know you’ve got Dan Wells’s I Am Not A Serial Killer.

This funny, sad, scary novel stars John Wayne Cleaver, who notes himself that his name seems to be made for a serial killer: John Wayne, the first two names of John Wayne Gacy, who raped and killed at least 33 young men and boys in Chicago during the 1970s, and cleaver, a potential murder weapon. Never mind that he was actually named for a western movie star; this feels like fate to John. Especially since his father is named Sam, making him the Son of Sam. That he lives over a mortuary and has been helping embalm bodies since he was seven is just the icing on the cake.

John has all sorts of rules to keep himself from killing people. He has a best friend he pretty much hates, and he forces himself to pay compliments to people who anger him. There’s a monster he keeps behind a closed door in his mind, and he intends to never let him out. The occasional school paper on Jeffrey Dahmer is just to intrigue teachers and let off a little steam. It helps that he has a good therapist, even if his diagnosis is antisocial personality disorder.

All is going fairly well until an actual, practicing serial killer comes to Clayton County and people start dying in an especially gruesome manner. John finds out who the perpetrator is, and begins looking for ways to stop him, using all his own serial killer skills to do it. It makes things a lot more difficult for John to keep his monster caged, because it requires John to break quite a number of his rules. But his obsessive knowledge of serial killers and their backgrounds and methods gives him the perfect tools to catch a killer no one else would suspect.

This book reminded me a fair bit of the DEXTER novels by Jeff Lindsay in the way they speak of the killing part of a serial killer as a separate entity with which the protagonist shares brain space. But the similarity ends there. John is a troubled teen who truly does show all the signs of a serial killer, including the MacDonald triad, three traits shared by ninety-five percent of serial killers: bed-wetting, pyromania and animal cruelty. Wells writes some excruciatingly familiar scenes to anyone who has ever been a teenager that are even more excruciating because of John’s, um, disability: talking to a girl at a school dance, dealing with the school bully, helping out an elderly neighbor. He has a real flair for his material, both the killing part and the typical teenage part. All of it is written in clear, straightforward, first-person prose. The reader cannot turn the pages fast enough.

Surprisingly, Wells brings the supernatural into his story. I am not sure why he made this decision, and have been trying to decide whether it is a flaw. I’ve been uncertain ever since reading the book whether the notion of the supernatural was a means by which John dealt with the serial killer (i.e., it was easier to think of him as a demon, not human, and therefore someone it was okay to hunt and kill; it was part of John’s psychosis to make him an “other” in his mind) or whether the killer really was a demon (John’s mother witnesses events that seem to confirm the killer’s demonic nature). Most murder mysteries can be forgotten within moments of reading the last paragraph. This one sticks with you.

One note: this book seems to be aimed at a teenage market. I think it’s probably fine for those who are about fifteen and up, but it’s not something I’d give to a precocious 10-year-old who is reading at a young adult level. It’s a little too intensely violent – which is probably why older teens will love it.

If you like this book, there’s more of John Wayne Cleaver in Mr. Monster and I Don’t Want to Kill You. I’m looking forward to getting to these two books after the fun of Dan Wells’s first outing. Perhaps they will explain more about John’s world, in which the supernatural coexists with the natural; or about John’s psychosis, which turns normal people into demons so that John can deal with them. Either way, I’m eager to see what comes next.

Let the Right One In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist, is a bleak and chilly horror novel that evokes classic Stephen King works like Salem’s Lot. Lindqvist is a Swedish writer and the book is set in a planned community in northern Sweden, called Blackeberg, in 1981. The novel follows several different point of view characters as the events that will change the community forever begin to unfold.

From the beginning, Lindqvist wants the reader to understand Blackeberg.

“It was not a place that developed organically, of course. Here everything was carefully planned from the outset. And people moved into what had been built for them. Earth-colored concrete buildings scattered about the green fields.”

Part of the atmosphere of the novel, and its bleakness, stem from the ideal vision of Blackeberg, created in the 1950s, and the dreary reality of it in 1981, with high unemployment, a nanny-state government, and understandable paranoia about the Soviet Union. The book introduces a group of drunks who congregate at a Chinese restaurant; a young hoodlum-in-training whose mother is engaged to a policeman; a boy with a fractured home life and a strange, haunted man, Hakan, who is the guardian and jailer of the young girl named Eli.

The heart of the story, though, is the boy, Oskar, and his blossoming friendship with Eli. Oskar lives in one of the housing complexes in Blackeberg with his mother. His father, who is an alcoholic, lives far away. Oskar has become the target of the school bullies. His mother is overprotective in the ways that don’t matter — always telling him to wear his hat — but she has no idea what her son is really confronting. Oskar keeps a scrapbook of serial killers, shoplifts to feel some sense of power, and indulges in more and more violent fantasies. Then a boy is killed in the forest not far from Blackeberg, and serial killers become a reality for him.

Oskar meets Eli, the strange little girl from next door. She can brave the cold with only a thin, short-sleeved sweater; she is incredibly athletic; her way of speaking is strange, as if she doesn’t know modern slang or current events. She is home-schooled by Hakan, a man she identifies as her father. He is not her father. He is the man who killed the boy in the forest, and is planning to kill more people and drain them of blood — blood Eli needs in order to survive.

Eli was twelve years old when she was transformed into the thing she is, and she must always depend on someone to travel with her, protect her while she sleeps during the day and bring her blood. It is a precarious existence. As horrifying as Eli’s nature is the window into her relationship with Hakan, who harbors fantasies of sex with young children and believes that he loves Eli.

When Hakan is unable to bring her blood, Eli hunts on her own, killing one of a group of barflies. Hakan disposes of the body, but the other alcoholics suspect something is wrong and begin to investigate.

Oskar is more focused on his own problems. The hazing and bullying he endures is growing worse. Lindqvist writes about bullying as well as King did in several of his books. At the beginning of Let the Right One In, Oskar humiliates himself in front of his tormentors, squealing and grunting like a pig, to avoid a beating. There is no rational reason for the attacks on Oskar. He has just been chosen, and his former friends have drifted away from him. Eli, though, tells him to fight back, and Oskar begins to get stronger.

One of this novel’s strengths is the depiction of the various facets of Eli’s nature. She is a child. She tells Oskar that she even though she has been alive for more than two hundred years, she always feels twelve. She is not maturing. Her friendship with Oskar seems genuine, but we have also watched her bargain with and manipulate Hakan. We also see her hunt. To nourish her, the blood she consumes has to come from a live human body, not animal blood, not blood from a dead person. If Eli does not break the neck or otherwise destroy the body, the person whose blood she drank will become what she is. Eli can fly and has retractable claws that allow her to scale buildings. She is a monster, but we have empathy for her.

The most tragic story arc in the book is that of Lacke, one of the drinkers, and Virginia. Virginia is a truly innocent victim, and the lost opportunity between these two damaged souls is heart-breaking. Eli is interrupted when she feeds off Virginia, and over the period of a day Virginia transforms. This allows Lindqvist to show the reader the mechanics of his vampire. Virginia’s resolution, once she understands the truth, is terrifying and heroic.

Young practicing criminal Tommy and his sparring match with his mother’s fiancé, the pious control-freak policeman Staffan, add another level to the book.

“Tommy’s mom grabbed him by the elbow and whispered, ‘Why do you say things like that?’

‘I was just wondering.’

‘He’s a good person, Tommy.’

‘Yes, he must be. I mean, with prizes for pistol shooting and the Virgin Mary. Could it get any better?’”

The heart of the book, though, is the sweet friendship between Eli and Oskar. Even when he knows what she is, Oskar stands by her. And when he confronts the bullies and the attacks on him escalate, Eli is the only one he can count on.

This is a horror novel, and there is no way it can end well. In spite of that I was rooting for Oskar and Eli to survive, even though their futures, if they did, would be grim and hellish. The real horror here, beautifully captured, is the sense that Oskar and Eli live lives of complete isolation. Oskar’s life is the difference between the ideal and the reality of Blackeberg.

Ebba Segerberg translated the edition I read, but I never felt like I was reading a translation. The English prose is assured and vigorous. This is an unusual version of a vampire story. Let the Right One In is as dark as a winter solstice night in a Norrland forest.

The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine by Peter Straub

Ballard, a wealthy businessman, and Sandrine, his much younger lover, are cruising down the Amazon River in a mysterious yacht. The crew is never seen, blank-eyed natives watch the boat from the river’s shores, and there seems to be a dangerous predator in the river. The dimensions of the yacht don’t make sense, the delicious food is unidentifiable, and it’s not clear how long Ballard and Sandrine have been on the boat.

Presumably, they’re taking a vacation somewhere out of the reach of Ballard’s clients and Sandrine’s husband, but as the story goes on, it seems that they’re also moving through time as they travel down the mighty river. We see the couple at various ages during the trip, always appearing a little uncomfortable with their feelings of disorientation and déjà vu.

Add to this eerie situation the unusual and revolting sexual fetish that brought Ballard and Sandrine together, and you’ve got quite an unsettling little horror story.

The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine is only 96 pages long, making this a novella that can easily be read in an evening. Straub succeeds in alarming the reader right from the start — why is Sandrine lying naked on a cold trenched metal workbench? The flutter in my stomach never went away and it only intensified as further disconcerting and indecipherable discoveries were made.

There is some beauty in The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine — they’re floating through the lush Amazon, after all — but these glimpses are too brief to alleviate the disturbing feelings of imminent doom. I love the idea of a time-travel yacht trip down the exotic Amazon River, and I would have even enjoyed the terror if it hadn’t been for the aforementioned sexual fetish. It’s intricately linked to the story and the plot relies upon it, but it was too much for my delicate senses. Less sensitive readers are more likely to enjoy The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine.

Granta strikes me as an unusual place to find horror fiction; it normally is home to the toniest of literary fiction. But Issue 117 is entitled “Horror,” so I thought I’d see what a literary magazine’s vision of this genre is.

As it turns out, the issue is a lot more about horror in real life than it is about the type of horror that is more safely tucked away in my imagination. Tom Bamforth’s nonfiction essay about war in Sudan, “The Mission,” presents a picture one wishes were only imagined, of children starving, women used as shields, soldiers with orders to shoot on sight. How easily we go about our days without ever thinking of these people: children too ill to even brush the flies away from their eyes, fourteen-year-olds wielding rocket launchers, the complete absence of men from home life, living hours away from the nearest fresh water, elderly family members abandoned at their own request so that there would be enough food — or at least more food — to feed to the children. It will make you feel unspeakably privileged.

At the other end of the non-fiction spectrum is Mark Doty’s “Insatiable,” an essay about sex — sex divorced completed from love, sex that is about the celebration of the body and nothing more (nor less). Doty takes his cues from Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker, strangely enough, writing about how Whitman was supposedly the model for Dracula and implying that both Whitman and Stoker were obsessed with sex. Doty relates some of his own sexual experiences in short, bruising sentences, taking enormous joy in stories that seem grotesquely promiscuous, completely shameless, a sort of sex life that can only be lived in a world of cities, wealth and tolerance, a world so remote from Darfur that it might as well be in another galaxy.

The fiction in this issue will break your heart. Stephen King’s short story, “The Dune,” is classic King, putting you so completely in the mind of the protagonist that you forget you are anyone else until you reach the twist. You can easily imagine that it was the receipt of this story that caused Granta to consider a horror issue, as it is easily worthy of having an entire issue built around it.

Julie Otsuka’s story of a beloved mother’s slow descent into Alzheimer’s Disease, “Diem Perdidi,” is heartbreaking. Written entirely as a catalog of what the unnamed “she” of the story remembers and what she no longer can keep inside her head, this story tells the history of a Japanese-American woman in the middle of the 20th century and all that entailed: racism, internment during World War II, the loss of a beloved, the death of a child. Again, this is the horror that one lives in real life. No ghosts, no ancient gods, no serial killers with vivid imaginations; this horror is felt by many in our world, our country, our hometowns every day. It’s the best story in this issue.

In the same vein is Paul Auster’s “Your Birthday Has Come and Gone,” a memoir oddly written in the second person, as if Auster is writing to himself about the death of his mother, attempting to understand this event by distancing himself from it ever so slightly. Following on Will Self’s “False Blood,” an essay about Self’s discovery that he was suffering from polycythaemia vera, it is yet another reminder of how fragile life is, how subject we all are to illnesses both mental and physical.

I didn’t care for Sarah Hall’s “She Murdered Mortal He,” a story of a woman on vacation in an African resort that is still very sparsely populated and rather wild. She has a quarrel with her lover and decides to take a walk on a deserted and somewhat dangerous beach. Each moment of her walk is fraught with tension as she balances on rocks, avoids what initially seem to be wild animals, and winds up in a bar that is no place for a woman alone. Yet the real danger seems to lie elsewhere, for others. It’s an odd little story, a bit too precious in the telling for its own good. Joy Williams’s “Brass” seems not to work entirely either, being dependent on a shocker of a last line for its effect.

Daniel Alarcon’s short essay, “The Ground Floor,” is about the opening of a new “crypto-gothic fight club” in Los Angeles called the Foam Weapon League. It’s hard to see how this piece fits into the horror theme, except that there’s plenty of fake blood in it.

“The Infamous Bengal Ming” by Rajesh Parameswaran is a story narrated by a tiger that escapes from the zoo, almost inadvertently. This creature doesn’t seem to understand his own nature, or his own powers, at the beginning of the story; he seems like a careless teenager more than a wild, caged animal. But given freedom, his fundamental nature comes to the fore. The horror here is that of the natural world, red in tooth and claw.

Don DeLillo’s contribution is from his new book, The Angel Esmerelda: Nine Stories. “The Starveling” is about a man who spends his days watching movies, carefully scheduling his four or five shows a day around Manhattan with sufficient precision to allow for transportation hassles and time for previews. It’s an odd picture of a life oddly lived, a life without purpose or love, told through the eyes of a protagonist who doesn’t even seem to understand that he’s missing anything, or that there’s anything to miss. It’s a strange story.

“Deng’s Dogs” by Santiago Roncagliolo is an autobiographical essay about Peru and its guerrilla movement, the Shining Path. It is another tale of real-life horror, but one that seems less immediate than Bamforth’s discussion of Darfur. Perhaps this is a matter of my own knowledge about the latter situation and my relative ignorance about the former. Both pieces make it clear, though, that humans don’t need anything supernatural in nature to create hell on earth.

Robert Bolano’s story, “The Colonel’s Son,” is an odd, once-removed zombie story, the retelling of a movie the narrator has seen. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from a friend after a drink or two, when he starts to believe that his experience of old movies is going to sound fascinating to you. You want to tell him to shut up, but you also want to know what happens next; you find yourself sucked into his narrative, not that you ever want to see this movie, just that you have to know. It’s an interesting way to tell a story, one that I’m not entirely certain is successful.

One can only conclude from this issue that the literary world sees horror a good deal differently than do those of us who like our fiction very dark. Horror is based very much on what already exists in this world, and requires nothing unusually evil to manifest; all it needs is human nature. Granta’s horror issue isn’t frightening, but it is horrifying.

Black Light by Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan & Stephen Romano

AUTHOR INFORMATION: Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan wrote the screenplays for Saw IV, Saw V, Saw VI, Saw 3D, and The Collector, which Dunstan also directed. Currently, they are filming The Collection — a sequel to The Collector — and have written Piranha 3DD, which came out this Thanksgiving from Dimension Films. Black Light is their debut novel.

Stephen Romano is an acclaimed author, screenwriter and illustrator. His works include the illustrated novel Shock Festival and adapting Joe R. Lansdale’s “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” for Showtime’s Emmy Award-winning series Masters Of Horror.

PLOT SUMMARY: If you have a supernatural problem that won’t go away, you need Buck Carlsbad: private eye, exorcist, and last resort. Buck’s got a way with spirits that no one else can match, and a lot of questions that only spirits can answer. Buck has spent years using his Gift to look into the Blacklight on the other side of death, trying to piece together the mystery of his parents and why he can’t remember anything before the age of seven. His quest for answers led him to the Blacklight Triangle, a stretch of unforgiving desert known for the most deadly paranormal events in history. A place where Buck almost died a few years ago, and where he swore he would never return. But then Buck takes a call from billionaire Sidney Jaeger, and finds himself working the most harrowing case of his career. One that will either reveal the shocking secrets of his life, or end it forever…

ANALYSIS: On the surface, Black Light features many of the same traits regularly employed in the urban fantasy genre including a contemporary setting, a first-person narrative, a cynical protagonist, etc. However, the book possesses some key ingredients that help differentiate the novel.

First and foremost is Buck Carlsbad’s unique Gift, which allows him to Pull a ghost/spirit into his body — imagine a human version of the proton pack and trap from Ghostbusters. Once a spirit is ingested, Buck can then see into the Blacklight, the world of the dead. Not only that, but he also has the ability to pull Artifacts from the Blacklight back into the real world, which plays an important role in the novel. Containment, meanwhile, is a whole different matter involving regurgitation and silver urns.

Next, Black Light is immensely entertaining, fueled by breakneck pacing and an action-packed story. Granted, things take a little while to get going after the initial introduction to Buck Carlsbad and his Gift, but once Buck finds himself on a maglev train facing off against the Blackjack Nine, Black Light goes into overdrive for the rest of the novel, highlighted by surprising twists and nearly nonstop excitement. What makes Black Light even more fun to read is the book’s refreshing mix of noir-influenced urban fantasy and in-your-face, R-rated horror. We’re talking grisly violence, profanity, explicit gore, a high body count, the works.

Finally, the prose in Black Light, particularly the scenes where Buck is using his Gift and looking into the Blacklight, is visceral and gripping:

The heat washes over my body, weaker than ever before, but then I tighten my grip on the madness, giving myself to it… and the madness is good, the madness fuels my body in a dreamtime sizzle, bursting and flashing, energizing. The dark blue glow intensifies. The voices of a million billion angry bastards rip off in my ears, thundering in the infinite spaces set before me, the neon-striped outlines of the real world just outside the menagerie of slithering zero gravity shapes, like half-formed moray eels and faces filled with burning eyes and cursing tongues.

As impressive as the prose might be, the rest of the authors’ performance is uneven. Characterization, for example, is shallow and unemotional. So as badass as Buck Carlsbad is with his powers and martial arts skills, I never really sympathized with him or his plight. And don’t even get me started on the one-dimensional supporting cast. Dialogue and plotting, on the other hand, are both fairly solid, if not conventional, specifically the banter and various plot devices used throughout the narrative. Creatively, I loved Buck’s Gift and the Blacklight, but things do get a little far-fetched, especially towards the end of the novel when events venture into comic book-like territory.

CONCLUSION: Black Light may be rough around the edges due to weak characterization and uneven writing, but the novel’s action-packed story and refreshing mix of horror and urban fantasy helped mask the book’s shortcomings, while delivering a thrilling reading experience. In the end, Black Light entertained the hell out of me and I sincerely hope Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan and Stephen Romano offer up another serving of Buck Carlsbad in the very near future…

Robert Bloch is justly famous for writing the scariest shower scene in history, even if it was Alfred Hitchcock’s movie that introduced it to a broader audience. Bloch is the author of Psycho, which introduced us to the cross-dressing, multiple personality-mass murder Norman Bates.

Over several decades Bloch wrote crime fiction, thrillers and horror. One recurring theme was that of the unsolved murders in Whitechapel, London in 1888, and the unknown killer with the nickname “Jack the Ripper.”

Subterranean Press has gathered together a collection of Bloch’s Ripper-themed work called Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper. It contains three short stories, a Jack the Ripper novel from the 1980s, the original teleplay from a classic (original) Star Trek episode, “Wolf in the Fold,” and two short essays from Bloch. The collection is introduced by horror writer Norman Partridge.

The short story “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” was written in 1943. Though dated, the piece still works today because of Bloch’s sense of dramatic timing. In Chicago, Englishman Sir Guy Hollis approaches successful psychiatrist John Carmody. Hollis is obsessed with solving the riddle of the Ripper murders. He has an insane theory—that Jack the Ripper never dies, and that his murders are sacrifices to some dark elder god in return for immortality. Hollis thinks that the Ripper is hiding among Carmody’s arty, bohemian crowd and that another rash of murders is about to start, since a sacrifice is due. Carmody humors him, taking him to a party full of poets, artists and writers. Hollis’s behavior is bizarre, but he persuades Carmody to go out with him the next night as well, which would be the night of the first murder. Hollis opens up to Carmody, explaining the root of his obsession about the Ripper. The final few pages gleam with atmosphere; the Negro bar where they stop for drinks, the shadowy areas on the street where streetlights don’t penetrate, the thick fog off the river; and the last three paragraphs are still shiveringly good. Like Damon Knight’s old story, “To Serve Man,” “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” is good, even when you know what’s coming.

The weakest of the three short stories is “A Most Unusual Murder.”  Hilary Kane is an observant fellow and knows his London neighborhood very well, so when a new antique shop appears overnight he is intrigued. He and his friend Wood go inside to explore. At first I thought that Kane was a kind of twisted Sherlock Holmes, with Woods as an unwilling, or unwitting, Dr Watson, but the story does not go in that direction. A worn medical bag with a set of initials soon puts Kane, who is obsessed with Jack the Ripper, on a circuitous search, one that ends in a predictable tragedy. The story counts on a time-travel paradox to work, and the opening section, in the sinister shop, is not completely successful. It does work as a cautionary tale about the dangers of collecting, though.

“A Toy for Juliette” is a futuristic tale that first appeared in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology. Alone in her soundproofed pleasure-chamber, Juliette waits to see what kind of “toy” her time-traveling grandfather has brought her this time. Grandfather travels from Juliette’s time in our future, when the earth is poisoned and the handful of remaining humans lock themselves in domes, into the past, where he abducts people. Juliette admires her “playthings;” the iron maiden, the rack, the shackles, and the sharp knife she has tucked under the pillow on her bed, while she waits for her grandfather’s return. She also reflects on her life. The story is a nod to the Marquis de Sade. The most chilling part is not the climax but Grandfather’s careful shaping of a sociopath.

“Wolf in the Fold” was written in 1967. Fans of classic Star Trek remember the “Red Jack”episode. During a shore leave on a mellow, peaceful planet, Mr. Scott is accused of stabbing a local girl to death. Scotty, normally the most gallant of men, is recovering from a head injury he got in an accident caused by a woman crew member. As the murder is investigated two more women are killed, including a crew member. Scotty is near them each time. The suspense ratchets up as Kirk and Spock persuade local law enforcement to move the investigation to the Enterprise. In a manner of speaking, the solution to “Wolf in the Fold” is similar to “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper.”  Both pieces postulate long-lived entities. Serious fans will enjoy reading the first draft of this episode.

Night of the Ripper is an original Bloch novel published in 1985. It starts the night of the first murder attributed to Jack the Ripper, and follows several characters, trading points of view. Mark Robinson is a young American doctor come to study at London Hospital and Dr. Albert Trebor is one of his mentors. Mark is interested in the study of psychology, an art Dr. Trebor doesn’t have much use for. Eva Sloane is a lovely nurse probationer at the hospital. The shock of the first murder grows into fear and distrust as the deaths continue.

Bloch intersperses the action throughout the book with reactions from various “bit player” characters, including the several people who were suspected; a Jewish barber-surgeon, a shoemaker, the Duke of Clarence (Queen Victoria’s grandson) and so on. The book feels episodic until Detective Abberline appears. Once Abberline is on the page the book develops the structure, to some extent, of an investigation.

Many real-life historical figures make an appearance. Arthur Conan Doyle gives Abberline some advice; Abberline interviews Oscar Wilde and meets George Bernard Shaw. Mark has an encounter with John Merrick, the Elephant Man.

A real-life person connected with the investigation who lost his job because of it is Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Warren, a military man newly assigned to this position, was already unpopular with the press when the Ripper murders started. Bloch portrays him, probably accurately, as an arrogant bully and engages in some merciless fun at his expense, as in this scene where a political superior reads Warren a letter, a sample of many, which makes suggestions for how the investigation should go. Warren does not take the suggestions well:

“ Sheer drivel!’ Warren halted before the desk, bringing his cane down with a thud. “Even a child would know we’ve considered such matters from the start. Why should anyone bother with the advice of some bloody stupid crank?  Give me the name of the fool who wrote this—I’ll have his guts for garters!”

“Allow me to finish.”  Matthew raised the letter and scanned the final lines.

“These are the questions that occur to the Queen on reading the accounts of this horrible crime. Signed this day and date—Victoria R.”

All of the characters we meet have dark secrets and dark spots on their souls. This is Bloch’s way of keeping you guessing; which of them is the murderer?  Or is it someone else entirely?

Night of the Ripper did not age well. I think the book took an original, or at least unusual, view of the killer in 1985, but in 2011 it is easily figured out. Although atmospheric, the book lacks a genuine Victorian feel. Eva and Mark’s rocky relationship, for instance, would fit a 1980s cop drama better than a story set convincingly in 1888. Abberline emerges as an honest cop with good instincts, and the final few pages are suspenseful, intense and dramatic, even if you have already figured out what is going on.

The collection is book-ended by a preface by Bloch and a short essay called “Two Victorian Gentlemen,” in which Bloch speculates on the popularity of Jack the Ripper and Count Dracula. In the preface, Bloch states that is the mystery that has given the Ripper his literary staying power; in “Two Gentlemen” he talks about sexual repression. The best thing about both essays is the author’s voice; fresh and immediate, as if Bloch were grinning at you over a glass of rye on the rocks.

I wish that Subterranean Press had put the publication histories of each piece in the book, rather than sending me to the Internet for them. This book will appeal to “Ripperologists” or fans of Bloch, and the histories would make the book richer. This is a nice collection to round out a bit of the history of American horror, and a tribute to Bloch, but I do not think it will entice new readers. It is for aficionados. The new readers it might attract, if they do not already read Bloch, would be fans of the original TV show Night-Stalker. I’m giving the book three stars, but I think this is for a limited audience.

A western horror story full of gay gunslingers and the Pinkerton men they seduce – sometimes you can understand why people ask writers where they get their ideas, because Gemma Files sure has a humdinger of one with this first novel. Throw in some Mayan mythology and a lot of magic, and you’ve got a plot that comes at you so fast and furiously that you have to put the book down just to catch your breath.

A Book of Tongues is Volume One of the HEXSLINGER Series, to be continued in A Rope of Thorns (which has been published and is on my shelf, though I haven’t gotten to it yet). Two characters dominate the first volume:  Chess Pargeter, an incredible shot who thinks as little of killing another man as you or I think of killing a mosquito; and his lover, Reverend Asher Elijah Rook, an ex-Confederate chaplain who becomes imbued with magic when he undergoes the punishment meant for another man. The story is told mostly from the point of view of Edward Morrow, a Pinkerton man sent to infiltrate Rook’s gang and get a reading on his magical abilities.

Rook is a reluctant hexslinger, one who uses Bible verses to shape and charge his magic only when he sees no other alternative – at least, that’s the case at the outset of the novel. He falls into a life of crime pretty much by accident, the same way he falls into a sexual and emotional relationship with Chess, but once started down that road, he has to figure out how to deal with it all. He wrestles mightily with all of this, none of which he asked for; some might say he became a bad man solely because he chose to be a good man on one occasion.

Chess believes of himself that he is simply a gunslinger who happens to be a homosexual. The son of a San Francisco whore, he sees himself as something similar, a man who uses sex to get what he wants – except when it comes to Rook.  He fascinates men who consider themselves heterosexual, and they seem to fall in love with him – truly in love – with surprising ease. Is this Chess’s own magic, or is there something else going on here?

Morrow tries to figure the whole thing out, and to measure the magic Rook gives off for a special study the Pinkertons are doing, but he finds himself involved in the gang more deeply than he expected. When Rook goes on a sort of magical mystery tour and drags Chess and Morrow along, things get very ugly.

Files writes about graphic sex and violence in way that does not spare her readers in the slightest. You’re likely to wind up with things you’d rather not have in your head, in a kind of detail that you can’t easily shake out. Yet despite this, or maybe because of it, the pace of A Book of Tongues starts to flag around the middle of the book. Files, who has written plenty of short fiction, doesn’t yet seem to have the pacing of a novel figured out, much less the pacing of a series of at least two books. The power of the images she builds with her horrific descriptions dissipates the longer she writes, so that one becomes inured to it and wants merely to know what happens next, and becomes impatient with yet another bloody scene.

Nonetheless, there is a strong talent at work here. As Files polishes her work and her technique, I expect that she will be writing novels strong enough to compete with the best in the horror field. Despite my misgivings about the pacing of A Book of Tongues, I’m left wanting to know what happens next to these characters.

We are living in a Golden Age of the short story of the fantastic, as is ably demonstrated by John Langan in his first collection of short stories, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. Langan writes the sort of psychological horror that reminds one of both Henry James and M.R. James, as Elizabeth Hand points out in her introduction to this collection. Each story is elegantly written, with craft evident in every sentence.

Langan’s Jamesian heritage is especially clear in the first story in the book, “On Skua Island,” which uses a plot device that should be worn past using by now, though Langan shows us it is not: the tale told to a group of friends during a social gathering. This particular gathering is in a house on the coast of an unnamed ocean during a strong February storm. Those gathered, who appear to be mostly academics and writers (or at least individuals very well versed in the tropes of horror fiction), pass some time talking about vampires, werewolves, zombies and mummies, concluding early in their discussion that nothing new can be said about mummies.

Until Nicholas speak up, that is. Nicholas, who has been largely silent during the party, tells his story of an archeological dig on Skua Island, located north-northwest of the Shetland Islands. This island, located far from any human habitation, is apparently of some interest to MI-5, Britain’s intelligence agency, and the dig is a cover; but Nicholas doesn’t care, because photographs of the area show that he might well make a discovery on the island crucial to his own particular theories about the Vikings. Nicholas’s time on the island is limited by the needs of MI-5.  He must move quickly. So, when he discovers runes on a column that stands above his site, he cannot wait to translate them before proceeding to find what lies underneath. Nicholas discovers, to his regret, that one should always read the instructions first – and thereby hangs his tale.

“Mr. Gaunt” has an equally venerable storyline: the family member who enters the private space of a superior family member, only to find something he or she does not wish to see. The classic tale is “Bluebeard,” of course, in which a wife opens a room she’s been told never to enter, only to find the dead bodies of her husband’s previous wives. This tale, again told in a frame (a man who discovers an audiotape left to him when his father dies), is of a boy who enters his father’s study when his father is away. There the boy discovers the true nature of his father’s servant, Mr. Gaunt – and, it might well be said, of his father as well. The story, even with its ancient heritage, is altogether new here, and Langan tells it with grace and terror.

“Tutorial” is the weakest story in the collection, but it relieves the tension Langan has built up in his first two stories. It tells of James, a creative writing student who longs to write but is an atrociously bad writer. He doesn’t quite know this; he thinks he’s merely writing great horror fiction that his instructor can’t appreciate because he disapproves of genre writing. When his instructor sends him to a tutor, he and the tutor argue about the usefulness of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style and whether Samuel Delany is a writer of any worth (“He writes science fiction,” James says; “Which explains why I’ve never heard of him,” the tutor responds). The tutor gives up and passes James on to another tutor, further downstairs in the Humanities Building, who goes through much the same process. “Omit needless words” from Strunk & White makes another appearance, and James again snorts with disgust at the advice. This tutor, too, sends him on, further downstairs, this time to a man known only as The Editor. The Editor has some, well, interesting ways of making fledgling writers behave. The story is clearly intended to be self-mocking, at least to an extent; but it ultimately fails because of the inconsistent ending. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the in-joke, because I did, but this story really is one that The Editor probably should have had a good crack at.

“Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers” is as science fictional as Langan’s writing gets, and is a strange experiment in imagination. It is the oddest love story I’ve ever read, or at least the oddest story of seemingly romantic obsession. No explanations are offered for anything that happens in this story; as one might expect from the title, it seems to start in the middle. All we know is that two humans are traversing a world gone awry, where cars are stopped in the middle of the road and populated by purple flowers. It reads like a particularly bad nightmare, and one I hope never to experience for myself.

In “Laocoon, or The Singularity,” the final and best story in the book, Langan returns to more traditional storytelling. The protagonist is Dennis, an artist still struggling to finish his master’s degree in fine arts. He has little patience for the classes he teaches as part of his work, even though he is in line for a tenure track position should he ever complete his degree. And he has lost his family, including his two sons, because he is simply too much of a loner, lost in his appreciation of art for art’s sake, to pay sufficient attention to getting anything accomplished. Not that he is a dreamer, exactly; Langan paints him as more of a stubborn ideologue who enjoys being contrary.

The story begins when Dennis discovers what appears to be an artwork of an alien creature in the trash, and hauls it back to his apartment. He is not satisfied with the face the creature has been given, and devotes much thought to how to craft something new, something exactly right. But from the start, this “artwork” has exercised a strange power over him, not even counting the wound he suffered in hauling the thing up his stairs – a wound that won’t heal, that has become strangely infected. When inspiration for the Face does strike, it strikes with a vengeance. “Laocoon” is an accomplished story that you won’t forget, no matter how hard you try.

We thought that Halloween was the perfect occasion on which to combine Magazine Monday with Horrible Monday and bring you a review of a horror magazine. Black Static is a British horror magazine notable not only for the high quality of its fiction, but also for its great commentary and extensive reviews of horror films and books. This was my first experience reading the magazine, but my plan is now to subscribe, because this is great stuff.

Simon Bestwick’s story, “Dermot,” starts off calmly enough, with a man who seems mentally disabled boarding a bus. He’s wearing a suit that seems a bit big, but it’s clean and pressed, and he’s carrying an old-fashioned briefcase. He sounds, from the description, like a man who is playing dress-up, pretending that he has a job. He seems harmless, but he makes people uncomfortable; the man next to whom Dermot sits on the bus gets up and changes seats for no apparent reason. Dermot doesn’t care, but it seems like an unkind act by that nameless man. The scene abruptly changes to an office in a police station, a department labeled “Special Needs,” and the reader begins to wonder whether this is where Dermot works. The officers working there, though, have some sort of dread of their jobs. They’re the butt of jokes by others in the department. When Dermot gets to the door, it seems that the jokes come because these officers work with individuals who do, in fact, have “special needs,” though at first that seems like a relatively harmless pursuit — but those officers seem afraid of Dermot, and why is that? It isn’t until the deal between the police and Dermot is made explicit that the horror of this work is revealed. You’ll feel your stomach turn over when you get to the denouement.

“A Summer’s Day” by K. Harding Stalter is mysteriously creepy. The reader doesn’t learn exactly who the narrator is, but he seems to be the victim of torture, day after day, year after year, to the point where he’s named the instruments used on him:  Macintosh, Carmichael, McKinsey, Jones. He is used to demonstrate something to an auditorium of students.  Is it torture, or medicine, or something else altogether? The story doesn’t say. But one day, at the conclusion of that day’s festivities, he escapes into the summer. The grass and ground beneath his feet, the sun and shade, all are almost new sensations, it’s been so long since he felt them.  And how does our narrator use his freedom? Ah. That would be telling.

A new story by Ramsey Campbell is always a treat, and “Recently Used” has an elegiac quality that can lead you as easily to tears as to horror. It’s a story of loss rendered as nightmare, and communicates something of the never-ending grief caused by the death of a loved one. “You’ll feel better soon” is not something one can say to Charles Tunstall. This is a story that only a master could write.

Have you ever loved someone who loved even the darkest parts of you – indeed, who perhaps loved those parts of you the most? Jeff finds such a love in Rachel in “Still Life” by Simon McCaffery. Why doesn’t he realize there’s something odd about a woman who loves to look at his photographs of charred corpses and other horrors of war? Are Jeff’s motives in taking these pictures — to make war so horrific that it will stop — really as pure as he tells himself? Is Rachel too enamored of his work? It’s a cautionary tale, and then some.

“How the 60s Ended,” by Tim Lees, is a less successful story about a friendship between two young boys. This ghost story is a bit too gentle and subtle, failing to deliver the punch one would expect from the notion of a child’s death.

There are 12 pages of horror film reviews in a column entitled “Blood Spectrum” by Tony Lee. I’m astonished that anyone can view that much horror in a mere two months, and still find time to write about it all. The reviews are short and to the point, making it easy to determine whether a particular film is one you’d like to watch. I’m not a horror film aficionado myself, finding such films too gruesome, even though I can read the most gruesome stories without flinching. But if I watched horror films, I’d find Tony Lee a very fine interpreter. Peter Tennant’s “Case Notes” follows, with smart, in-depth reviews of horror fiction. Tennant writes with cold passion about books he enjoyed and the books that disappointed him, noting faults and flashes of brilliance. Black Static would be worth purchasing for the reviews alone. Tennant also interviews Kaaron Warren in this issue, causing her fiction to move up in my “to be read” pile.

There are three columns at the front of the magazine, allowing three writers to talk about whatever takes their fancy. Stephen Volk writes about how to name characters in “Coffinmaker’s Blues.”  Christopher Fowler writes about the resurrection of censorship in “Interference.” Mike O’Driscoll writes about our seeming willingness to trade privacy for security — or even just for gossip — in “Night’s Plutonian Shore.” It’s an interesting trio of articles to find in a horror magazine; all three are well-written and interesting to read. Finally, the magazine also contains a column entitled “White Noise,” containing snippets of news for horror fans.

According to Webster’s, “occultation” means “the state of being hidden from view or lost to notice” or “the shutting off of the light of one celestial body by the intervention of another; esp: an eclipse of a star or planet by the moon.”  Both definitions seem appropriate to Laird Barron’s collection, Occultation and Other Stories, the latter as metaphor, because Barron can scare you as much with what remains hidden in his stories as with what he drags from the shadows and exposes to your horrified view. This second collection by this relatively new horror writer builds on the promise of The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, and makes it clear why no “year’s best” gets issued these days without at least one piece by Barron in it.

“Strappado,” for instance, is one of the most frightening stories I’ve ever read, and it haunts me even though it’s been a couple of years since I first read it in Ellen Datlow’s anthology, Poe. It’s the story of a couple of wealthy men, dissipated but still interested in new experiences of vice, art, and drink. After a passionate sexual interlude following a chance reunion in an Indian tourist town, they make their way to a disco off the beaten path. After drinking themselves almost into oblivion, they hear of a chance to see a Van Iblis exhibition. Van Iblis, it seems, is a guerilla artist, unwelcome in most countries “[b]ecause the shit he pulls off violates a few laws here and there. Unauthorized installations, libelous materials, health code violations. Explosions!” The excitement of seeing one of his exhibitions cannot be denied, and the men crowd into a rental van with a number of other thrill seekers for a long drive inland. The setting for the exhibition doesn’t seem too exciting:  prefabricated warehouse modules and storage sheds, a bulldozer and, ominously, plastic barrels of hydrochloric acid. The longer you read, the more you can feel the jungle starting to close in, and the more things start to feel off kilter; this just isn’t right. Very much not right, as things turn out, though I’m not going to tell you another word about it, except to say that I’ve begun to reconsider having red as my favorite color. If this story doesn’t give you nightmares, it’s only because you haven’t read it yet.

A few of the other stories make it clear that Barron is doing for the Pacific Northwest what H.P. Lovecraft did for New England (except that Barron is a better writer). There are Old Ones living in the forests, and they mean us no good. In “Mysterium Tremendum,” Willem finds a book entitled “Moderor de Caliginis” – “The Black Guide” – in a Seattle general goods store off the beaten track. It promises to contain directions to “secret attractions, hidden places, and persons ‘in the know’ regarding matters esoteric and arcane.” It seems just the thing for planning a camping trip he and his lover and another couple will be taking soon. One particular site catches his eye: a dolmen on Mystery Mountain.  Glenn, Willem’s partner, had told him that there were no megaliths or dolmen in Washington State, but the guide seems to differ. It sounds to him like an ideal place to explore.

The four head out in a sky-blue Land Rover for their trip, spending the first night in an old hotel in Olympia and heading onward to the Dungeness-Sequim Valley just in time for the Lavender Festival. A night of drinking in a local tavern turns into a hell of fistfight when some of the drunks decide they don’t like the gay foursome drinking in the same place they’re drinking. The four prevail rather bloodily and head for the wilderness – and now things start to get strange. The road they’re on is almost impossible to navigate, the sheer mountainside to their left and a cliff to the right. The first night of camping leaves the group with “horror-show dreams,” they all wake up aching from the fight, and it’s time to go hiking for the dolmen, which seems like a much spookier prospect now than it did when they were making plans.

They find it. It would have been better if they hadn’t.

Barron doesn’t use Lovecraft’s word “eldritch” once, and the goriest his story gets is in describing the fight, not in telling what happened at the dolmen. By no means, though, should you get the impression that this means he doesn’t write enough. He is a master at writing just the right amount of description for your mind to run away with images of places you’d really rather not visit. I, for one, don’t expect to ever encounter a dolmen in the woods of Washington State; Barron even writes in the story that there aren’t any there. I’d suggest that you not attempt to confirm this, because if a dolmen exists in Washington, it’s definitely home to things that don’t love you. Or maybe they love you too much? Either way, you don’t want to meet them.

“The Broadsword” is another story that helps build up the alternate reality of Washington State that Barron is creating. The wilderness there is vast and deep, something those who keep to Seattle don’t think about too much, and a man can get lost in those forests. That’s what happened to Terry Walker on a surveying trip; his partner, Pershing Dennard, never saw him again. Well, at least not until much later in his life, and under considerably different circumstances. See, he didn’t exactly get lost; he got taken. And now he has the opportunity to take Pershing along with him:

Pershing was taken through a hole in the sub-basement foundation into darkness so thick and sticky it flowed across his skin. …

An eternal purple-black night ruled the fleshy comb of an alien realm.  Gargantuan tendrils slithered in the dark, coiling and uncoiling, and the denizens of the underworld arrived in an interminable procession through vermiculate tubes and tunnels, and gathered, chuckling and sighing, in appreciation of his agonies. In the great and abiding darkness, a sea of dead white faces brightened and glimmered like porcelain masks at a grotesque ball. He couldn’t discern their forms, only the luminescent faces, their plastic, drooling joy.

Can you hear the Lovecraft?

Barron would like you to read “—30—“ only after dark, and preferably when you’re alone, but really, in order for this story to completely creep you out, none of that is necessary. A team of two naturalists, one male and one female, is studying an area in the hills is what seems to be Eastern Washington (yes, the wilds of Washington State again). There’s a coyote den that doesn’t seem to be quite right, and the insects aren’t behaving the way you’d expect them to, and wow, it’s really isolated where they are, and isn’t she starting to act rather strangely, now that he thinks about it? When he starts having dreams in which he “limp[s] across a plain that stretched beneath a wide, carnivorous sky,” the end doesn’t seem like it can be long in coming, but you’re only halfway there.

Occultation and Other Stories contains nine stories, three of which are original to this volume. There is a smart introduction by Michael Shea, the author of The Autopsy and Other Tales. The book is published by Night Shade Books, a small press that I much admire, and they’ve put together a nice product with a cover painted by Matthew Jaffe that is appropriately odd – his first published cover art.

As I’ve been writing this review, the fog has been creeping over the hills where I live. Already I can’t see past the house across the street into the canyon behind it. It’s almost as if Barron’s stories have crept out from between the covers of this book and started infecting my world, so I’m going to finish this up in a hurry by telling you that there isn’t a clunker in this whole bunch of stories, damn it, and they’re all scary as hell, double damn it, and if you’d like to know about the future of horror, you need to read this book. Just keep a tumbler of whiskey by your elbow to deaden the effect, though whether that will really work is anyone’s guess. It doesn’t seem to help Barron’s characters much.

Disclosure: I met Laird Barron at the World Fantasy Convention in October 2009, and had a burger with him and John Langan, another fairly new horror writer who is equally talented in a completely different way. I told Barron how much his stories scared me, and he looked very pleased – which is sort of macabre when you think about it, isn’t it? Isn’t it sort of sadistic to take delight in scaring people? Except that he’s a really nice guy. Anyway, I think this is why Barron named me in his acknowledgments at the front of this book, and I am honored. But if I felt that this would prevent me from being straight with you about my reaction to this book, I would not have reviewed it.

Caution: it is difficult to write about The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters and not give anything away. This post might contain spoilers.

The Little Stranger is a book about a haunted house. Sarah Waters evokes emotion masterfully here. It’s not heart-pounding terror or a nauseated response to some gruesome revelation. She evokes dread, dread and a growing sense of anxiety that has you peering into the shadows and flinching at the creaks and sighs of your own house.

Hundreds Hall is a stately home in the English countryside, inhabited by the Ayres family. In 1949, when the story begins, the house is in near ruin, bottoming out of a slow slide to decay that started in the 20s. Three Ayreses live there now, the last of the line.

The story is told by Dr. Faraday, a local country doctor. His parents were servant class — his mother was a nursemaid at Hundred Hall for a time — who sacrificed and saved to send their son to medical school. Now Faraday is a practicing physician, not as successful as he’d like, and is in limbo, no longer servant class, unsure of where he belongs. Hundreds Hall has been a lodestone for him, the Great House, the symbol of the old aristocracy. When he is first called there for a medical visit he is shocked by the state of the place; the untended park, the overgrown garden, the leaking roof and the shut-up rooms. He is, however, charmed by the Ayres family and accepts their fantasy of genteel impoverishment. Waters opens the book slowly, mostly to let the reader see the state of Hundreds in the brutally honest light of day. Mrs. Ayres, the grand dame, is unable to do much except pine after the great old days. Her older surviving child, Caroline, forms a tenuous friendship with Faraday, while Roderick, the youngest and the only son, wounded in World War II, struggles to maintain the estate.

Waters is sure of herself and her skill, and takes the time she needs. It isn’t until the disastrous cocktail party on page 92 that the first terrible thing happens. It seems, to the characters at least, to be a horrible but natural occurrence. The reader knows better. After the event and its aftermath, both of which show Faraday as a doctor and at his best, things quiet down at Hundreds for a time. This is stillness, not peace, a coiled stillness fraught with speculation.

Roderick is the second victim of the thing — Caroline refers to it as an “energy” — that haunts Hundreds. Later in the book a character lectures Faraday about poltergeist activity, and how it appears in places where there is a reservoir of repressed emotion. There is plenty of repression at Hundreds. Mrs. Ayres, the Lady of the Manor, has never felt love for her two surviving children, and still mourns Susan, the daughter who died before they were born. Caroline, who during the war had a taste of freedom, of life, has had her leash jerked up short when she was called back to nurse her injured brother. Caroline, in fact, now lives her life in service to an estate that, because of British entailment laws, she is destined to lose. Roderick is more crippled by the responsibility of the failing property than by his damaged leg.

Faraday, while reporting this all to us faithfully, is blind to it himself, willfully choosing to see the sight of the Ayreses nesting like a family of raccoons in one or two habitable rooms of the house as gallant and eccentric, instead of sordid. He mentions, but does not deal with, his own emotional issues: small resentments as he is constantly reminded of his “place”; worry over the upcoming National Service and what it will mean for his practice; shame over the way he treated his parents. Early in the book Mrs. Ayres gives Faraday a photograph. It is an old family photo, with a woman in a maid’s uniform, who is probably Faraday’s mother. The gift is a kindness, but it is also a message, one that Faraday never quite deciphers, although we do.

The thing that infests Hundreds is angry and ravenous, and it slowly devours every scrap of joy or hope before it begins to feast on the physical lives of the inhabitants. Faraday, uniquely qualified to see what is really happening, never does, not even at the end of the book. The line between the material demands of a huge, crumbling building and the danger of a supernatural hunger is fine but not blurry. Waters knows exactly when to step over it.

This is a book that sits with you after you’ve finished it, not unlike the haunting entity itself. Once you’ve closed the cover, you’ll think back to the timing of certain things, and scenes that were merely frightening at the time become horrifying in retrospect. That’s what Waters wants to have happen, and she makes it happen perfectly.

It’s just a fact: Mondays are horrible. So why not spend Mondays reading horror? As a new feature here at FanLit, we’ll be reviewing a horror novel, collection or anthology on Mondays that are just too horrible for a Magazine Monday column. Let’s kick off with a look at Stephen M. Irwin’s debut, The Dead Path.

Good horror novels must be devilishly hard to write well. There has to be a proper balance between gore and straightforward exposition; between the supernatural and the real; between those who look askance at magic until it is too late, and those who embrace magic regardless of their previous disbelief. Stephen M. Irwin gets the balance just right in his debut novel, The Dead Path.

Nicholas Close becomes enmeshed in the plans of a very, very old witch very early in his life. She has her eye on him because he has a “gift” — one not realized until his beloved wife dies, but one he cannot escape thereafter. Nicholas can see ghosts. More precisely, he sees the ghosts of people who died violent deaths at precisely the moment of their deaths. And he sees these scenes replayed over and over and over. It’s a wonder he’s not completely insane. Certainly he’s at the end of his rope when he returns to his hometown of Tallong, Australia, soon after he has buried his wife in London.

His return seems to stir something up in the town, though, and odd things start happening very fast. A boy disappears in a crime almost identical to that committed against Nicholas’s best friend when he was a child. A man commits suicide on Nicholas’s front porch. And the woods that seemed so frightening when he was a child are even worse now. Now his “gift” enables him to see the ghosts of children hauled off into the woods by invisible hands, children whose bodies turned up with their throats slit.

Little more can be said about this novel without giving away important plot points. You should have the opportunity to confront the thrills and chills of this book for yourself, and I do recommend that you give it a try. Irwin is a fine new addition to the horror genre, and I look forward to whatever he writes next.

One cool point, something I’ve never seen on a book before: when you put this book down at night and switch off the lamp, the jacket glows. Spooky!