Stephen Jones (1) (1953–)

It’s a rare treat these days to get a brand-new horror anthology with top-notch authors and all never-before-published stories, but that’s exactly what master anthologist Stephen Jones delivers. After a short introduction in which Jones laments the rise of paranormal romance and similar fiction, the collection offers fifteen all-new stories. I’ll provide brief descriptions and impressions of each tale.

Mild plot spoilers follow.

Stephen King, “The Little Green God of Agony”: A nice show more little Stephen King short story that showcases King’s abundant talents, but is ultimately a little forgettable, and therefore just a middling kind of story for the likes of King. He clearly writes from the heart on this one: it’s the story of rich man who can buy anything but relief from the chronic pain he suffers. He’s tried everything to end his pain, except do the years of intensive physical therapy his doctors recommend. He finally calls in a different kind of pain relief specialist. An interesting look at the nature of pain from someone who’s certainly experienced a lot of it. Recommended.

Caitlin R. Kiernan, “Charcloth, Firesteel and Flint”: I hesitate to say much about this one, lest I ruin the fun. Suffice it to say, this is a story about a hitchhiker who is more than she appears to be, and a driver who picks up a hitchhiker who is also more than he appears. And fire. Fire is the essential element here. Kiernan’s writing is very evocative, using deep mythological and historical themes to paint a dark picture without directly depicting any actual blood, death, terror, etc. That takes real talent. Very well done.

Peter Crowther, “Ghosts with Teeth”: I’m just going to say it – I didn’t like this one. It’s a ghost story (I guess, though maybe it’s a story of spirit/demonic possession?), but it’s one of those horror stories that plays it so coyly with the reader that you can never tell what’s actually going on. There are some interesting elements, but in general, I’m not entirely sure I know what happened in the story, so I can’t recommend it.

Angela Slatter, “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter”: A very nice piece about a female coffin-maker in a world where coffin-making is both artistic and necessary to ensure that the dead stay dead. The protagonist is tormented by the ghost of her dead father – or is she? – and both she and her client have ulterior motives, which provides some interesting conflict to drive the story. I’d actually have liked to see Slatter do a little more with differentiating her setting from our own world’s historical past, but this is a short piece, so I understand why that additional fleshing-out of the setting may not have been possible. It’s well done though.

Brian Hodge, “Roots and All”: Take a modern-day rural community that’s been overrun by meth producers and sellers and add in some creepy, old-fashioned folktales and local legends. Ends on a dark note, with no easy answers. This was a nice long story, and one of my favorites in the collection.

Dennis Etchison, “Tell Me I’ll See You Again”: Very short piece about a group of children who fake elaborate deaths. Unfortunately pretty forgettable.

John Ajvide Lindqvist, “The Music of Bengt Karlsson, Murderer”: The first piece I’ve read from the Swedish creator of “Let the Right One In,” but I’m looking forward to reading more from him. Dark and moody story – and I think a uniquely Scandinavian one – about a widower and his son who move into a new home while dealing with their grief. It’s a story about their broken, distant relationship as much as it is about a murderous ghost. Very good stuff.

Ramsey Campbell, “Getting It Wrong”: Eric Edgeworth is not a very nice man. Sure, he may know a lot about films (though clearly not as much as he thinks he does), but he’s not the guy you want to call for help if you’re a participant on a quiz show. Campbell is nearly always reliable, and this story is no exception: nicely dark, though subtlely so, with a definite sardonic humor about it. Lots of fun.

Robert Shearman, “Alice Through the Plastic Sheet”: A bizarre little tale about some creepy new neighbors who move in next door and start causing problems, despite the fact that they’re never seen. Vaguely amusing, and I got what Shearman was going for here, but not one of my favorites in this very strong collection.

Lisa Tuttle, “The Man in the Ditch”: A young couple with a troubled past move into an isolated home in a rural area. It’s a simple enough ghost story, but surprisingly effective. Extremely spooky with a great ending.

Reggie Oliver, “A Child’s Problem”: Take a moment and Google the 1857 painting entitled “The Child’s Problem” by Patrice Richard Dadd. Pretty creepy image, right? That’s a pivotal scene in this novella. In many ways, this story is constructed as a kind of backstory for that painting. The story of a young aristocratic British boy sent to live with his emotionally distant, unpleasant uncle on an old estate where mysterious happenings abound. Oliver shows himself to be an outstanding writer, and is certainly a worthy successor of authors like M. R. James and others who wrote nineteenth-century antiquarian ghost stories. Extremely well done and enjoyable, even if you think you don’t like nineteenth-century ghost stories.

Michael Marshall Smith, “Sad, Dark Thing”: A man without much reason to go on living happens upon a “sad, dark thing” (that I won’t, and can’t, reveal). Sorry for the enigmatic description, but it’s better I not reveal too much. A bit more characterization could have made this even stronger, but I thought Smith did a superb job with this under-stated premise.

Elizabeth Hand, “Near Zennor”: Probably the longest tale in the collection, and certainly one of the strongest. An architect, grieving over the death of his wife, returns to the rural area where his wife grew up to find out more about her childhood after discovering some odd letters she wrote to a children’s book author as a young girl. Extremely evocative and hinting at a great deal – certainly one of those occasions in which the story is immeasurably strengthened by the fact that the reader (and protagonist) don’t actually know exactly what is going on. A real sense of dread and foreboding throughout. This story was sufficiently strong that it made me seek out other work by Elizabeth Hand.

Richard Christian Matheson, “Last Words”: Nice, short, haunting little closing story about a serial killer and the people he has killed. I don’t want to say more so as to not spoil it for you. A great piece, and a great way to close the anthology.

All in all, despite a couple misses – almost inevitable in an ambitious collection like this one – this is book that’s a must-read for fans of horror, especially those interested in horror fiction that’s neither paranormal romance nor torture porn. I also like that the collection includes brief afterwords by the authors reflecting on their stories; those are all-too-uncommon these days, and I appreciate it when an editor takes the time to solicit commentary from authors. The stories by King, Kiernan, Hodge, Oliver, Hand, and Matheson make this one a must-read. Several additional stories come close to hitting this very high bar. You simply must pick up a copy of A BOOK OF HORRORS.

Review copyright 2012 J. Andrew Byers show less

You can ignore the short introduction which claims this anthology is out to reclaim the label “horror” for scary stories. Not all the stories here are scary. Some aren’t even dark fantasy. And some left me somewhat unsatisfied.

But they all kept me interested.

Starting things off here is the big name: Stephen King. “The Little God of Agony” is an ok story, actually one of the lesser efforts here. It generated no disgust, revulsion, shock or, in fact, any other emotion in me. I found show more the biggest point of interest was King playing against type in which character he ultimately chooses to portray sympathetically: billionaire Newsome, who is in pain from an accident and is prepared to retain the strange service of a preacher, or his nurse and physical therapist Kat who thinks Newsome is trying to buy his way out of a situation where money doesn’t work.

The presence of Caitlín Kiernan was the whole reason I read this book. Like some other stories in this book, her “Charcloth, Firesteel and Flint” doesn’t really have much of a payoff in the end. But, if the destination isn’t anything special, the trip there certainly is. And the road trip here involves a mysterious, amnesiac hitchhiker and the boy who picks her up. Sure, as Kiernan admits in the story notes, it’s ultimately an excuse to string together some famous historical fires – like the firebombing of Dresden, the Peshtigo fire contemporaneous to the Great Chicago Fire, and a circus tent fire – in a plot vibrating with mythic resonance. That doesn’t mean it’s not enjoyable.

Angela Slatter’s “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter” is not horrific, but it is an interesting character study set in a Victorianesque world where death rituals are important to prevent the dead from haunting the living. The titular character is, in fact, haunted by such a ghost even as she goes about making a coffin and trying to seduce a widow.

Dennis Etchison’s “Tell Me I’ll See You Again” is a sketchy story about a young boy who likes to play being dead. Or, perhaps, it’s not mere play. He fascinates a young neighbor girl. However, he didn’t fascinate me, and this was my least favorite story.

“The Music of Bengt Karlsson, Murderer” mixes two horror themes: haunting and, perhaps, demonic possession. Author John Ajvide Lindqvist uses a folkloric concept from his native Sweden to good effect.

Ramsey Campbell’s “Getting It Wrong” is a nasty look at film buffs, quiz shows, and the social isolation of all too many in the modern world. Its protagonist gets some unwanted and unwelcome attention when he’s put on the spot by a co-worker who claims she needs his knowledge of film trivia to avoid something … well, something unpleasant.

Robert Shearman’s “Alice Through the Plastic Sheet” is sort of a horror story – the urban horror of the neighbor who plays loud music late at night. But it’s mostly the hilarious and surreal story of how the too calculated, de-sexed and routine, lives of a couple are changed by their mysterious tormenters.

“The Man in the Ditch” from Lisa Tuttle has a woman haunted by what looks to be a ghost of a Druidic sacrificial victim in the boggy region of England where she and her husband are building a house.

Reggie Oliver’s “A Child’s Problem” has a very Gothic flavor about it with its early 19th century English setting, mysterious structures, and family secrets. A smart, somewhat manipulative, boy is sent to stay on his uncle’s country estate while his parents seek their fortune in India. He finds his uncle testy and fearful of some judgement and given to handing out strange assignments to him to explore the grounds. And there are mysterious figures seen at night, hostile servants, and the mysterious chess game his uncle is playing against some unseen opponent.

Michael Marshall Smith’s “Sad, Dark Thing” is what is truly desired by those who wander aimlessly through life – as the protagonist finds out after he discovers it on an aimless drive through the Santa Cruz Mountains of California.

Elizabeth Hand’s “Near Zennor” is a curiosity, a story that may not be fantasy at all. A man, trying to connect once more with the life of his dead wife, comes across an account of a mysterious incident she and her friends experienced in 1971’s Cornwall when they were teenagers. And that incident isn’t the only mystery here. There’s the fantasy writer who inspired the girls to visit Cornwall and the question of whether he was a pedophile. And what explains the varying reactions of the girls to the visit? Is something going on near Zennor? Hand seems to slightly push us towards one interpretation of events, but there are still lingering mysteries. I didn’t find the last mystery all that interesting but, again, this one was another story I eagerly read even at novella length.

Serial killers like their trophies, and the narrator of Richard Christian Matheson’s “Last Words” likes to collect the final remarks of his victims. It’s not the narrator that makes this story disturbing as the almost inevitable banality and predictability of those last words. Matheson mars his short story a bit by evoking the abused child turned serial killer cliché.

Horror is a personal thing. Sometimes a certain image, a certain plot, a certain setting make a horror story burrow into the mind to take up a permanent spot in the memory. It’s an idiosyncratic process, so your level of disquiet may vary, but two stories here fit that requirement.

The wooded, rural setting of Brian Hodge’s “Roots and All” was familiar enough to me to cause an extra resonance in this tale of two cousins cleaning out the house of their beloved – and now dead – grandmother and being appalled at the changes time has wrought in the land they loved as youths. And things are markedly escalated when a new discovery is made about the fate of a family member who disappeared as a teenager.

The stand out story for me was Peter Crowther’s “Ghosts with Teeth”. A couple returns to their Maine town on Halloween to find it isolated by a storm, a possible intruder in their house, voices on the radio babbling about poltergeists, and sudden appearances and disappearances of their neighbors. A once trusted sheriff, now surrounded by a miasma of menace, is literally the stuff of my nightmares – as is the irrationality at the end of the story.

The Crowther, Shearman, and Hand stories by themselves justify buying this book. show less

I'm not sure why this anthology isn't rated much higher on average. People must be expecting some sort of berserk maniac monster mayhem but this collection features a lot of excellent subtle weird little horrors. The book is very literate (as in literature) as well. There wasn't a stinker in the batch. Even in the longer stories, there was so much interesting going on and the writing was so good, I didn't mind that there wasn't any severed jugular edge-of-my-seat horror going on. It was just show more damn fine writing.

If you like your horrors literate, quiet, and genre bending this is a good book for you. show less

Obviously a play on the children's book series SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK, Stephen Jones has collected some classic works of ghost and monster horror from well-known names (Stephen King and Neil Gaiman among them) and combined them with new works specifically for this collection. In addition, each story is effectively twice-illustrated by Randy Broecker.

Unlike the SCARY STORIES collection, these stories aren't really meant to be read aloud around a campfire. It would be difficult, show more for example, to read King's "Here There Be Tygers" (King readers might remember this one from one of his own 1980s short story collections) aloud with the same end-of-story jump-scare that many of the SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK tales are intended to have. For that reason, this obvious adult homage to the SCARY STORIES series is badly titled.

That said, it's a great collection and a highly recommended read, especially for those who might not already be familiar with Gaiman, King, Ramsey Campbell, or Charles L. Grant. show less