Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology (2008)

This book raised a difficult question for me. When do you give up on reading an anthology? I believe that I've been reading this book for over a year. I would pick it up, read a story or part of a story, dislike that story, and put the book down. I would want to give up and mark it as Did Not Finish (DNF) but then I would think that just because I disliked one story didn't mean that I would dislike another. So I would try again and do the same process of wanting to give up but not doing so. Some of the stories were too poetic and focused on the moon; at the same time, those stories had no substance, no hook, no story. Some were just boring. Most did not grab my interest. I did find five stories I liked enough to mention below but even two of those were reprints that I read elsewhere. That was another thing that frustrated me. For a book with a subtitle of "The New Horror", most of the stories were copyrighted in 2002 or earlier. As early as 1984 and 1990. Even granting time to pull the stories together and compile the book, that is not very "new" horror (for the original copyright of 2008). So as you can tell, I can't really recommend the book.

"Cleopatra Brimstone" by Elizabeth Hand - An attractive entomologist deals with life, a job in London, some men, and her love of butterflies.

"The Sadness of Detail" by Jonathan Carroll - A woman's drawings help her to accept life and to save the world.

"The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" by Stephen King - The story of a writer who goes mad and the editor who helps him. Told by the same, no-longer-mad editor.

"20th Century Ghost" by Joe Hill - A woman's ghost haunts a movie theater.

"October in the Chair" by Neil Gaiman - October tells the story of Runt and Dearly: a young boy and a ghost. ( )

Great pieces by Don Chaon, Elizabeth Hand, the Tems, Thomas Ligotti, Joe Hill and Jonathan Carroll. Really awful stuff from Brian Evenson, Glen Hirshberg, Benjamin Percy and Straub himself. Everything else is just about average. ( )

I tend to read anthologies and short story collections to find new authors in my favorite genres. And, so now, Jonathan Caroll (The Sadness of Detail) and Glen Hirshberg (The Two Sams) are living on my TBR list. Stephen King (The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet) and Joe Hill (21st Century Ghost) make appearances as well as a number of other very talented authors in the field of Horror writing. There were only two stories I could not finish and one that I really, really hated. Not bad out of a collection of 25 or so stories. Definitely worth the time and money. ( )

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There are some great stories in this collection of modern horror edited by Peter Straub, most of them from the big names you'd expect: Straub, King, Joe Hill, Neil Gaiman. I'm a big fan of Brian Evenson's work, but didn't care for his story here. Many of the stories, especially those in the first half of the collection, felt incomplete, as if they were excerpted from novels or truncated. There is some metafiction (fiction that calls attention to the fact that it is fiction), which surprised me. Overall the stories in the collection have a modern feel and they are similar to one another in tone, if not content. There are many different styles and devices on display in these stories. Some are frightening for what they don't say, such as Ellen Klages's story "The Green Glass Sea," about the sand that has turned to glass near a nuclear testing site. "Black Dust" by Graham Joyce, isn't so much frightening as it is haunting, and is an excellent example of the type of stories Straub seems to have been trying to collect. There are two memorable, if ultimately unsatisfying, stories involving the study of moths and butterflies. Overall, these stories seem to say that modern horror is not about the external (ghosts, werewolves and vampires), but about the internal, the way we haunt ourselves and the ways we are connected to this other, terrifying world. Rather than being another universe outside of ourselves, this realm of horror is a parallel universe to which we are inextricably tied. ( )