PopSyndicate.com

What Are You Scared Of?

Short stories are beautiful and compact. In his The Philosophy of Composition Edgar Allen Poe said, “if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed.”  It’s a shame that this form has faded away since the days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

But fear not lovers of literature. The short story still lives within the horror genre. I’ve never been a huge fan of long form horror. It’s too difficult to maintain the scare factor for 50,000 plus words.  But if you want to get scared fast, a short story works best.  If well done they allow the reader’s imagination to do a lot of the heavy lifting, dragging them into a nightmare

Ellen Datlow, editor of this new anthology Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, says as much in her insightful introduction.  That’s not to say that these stories are all quick gore. This collection does the job with a literary sensibility.

Datlow, has edited several collections of horror. (The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2007: 20th Annual Collection ). She knows what she’s doing and deftly includes varying styles. After all she features Joyce Carol Oates, a darling of my old English professors and a prolific word machine. Ms. Oats contributes the short/short “Face”, a quick sharp read.

Inferno is excellent but I didn’t like the opening story, “Riding Bitch” by K.W. Jeter. But let’s forget what I didn’t like. There are plenty of highlights, starting with “Misadventure” by Stephen Gallagher, a childhood ghost story that plays on innate fears. Familiar but new.

Some stories are best left unread. It took me a longtime to get clear of the haunting “The Monsters of Heaven” by Nathan Ballingrud. It involves angels, monsters, and aliens but not in anyway you would expect. Ballingrud frames the story in sci-fi but the meat of the it involves shattering personal loss. It’s beautiful and awful. It’s great literature but I’ll never go back to it. And that more than anything speaks to how well the story works.

Other high points include, “The Uninvited” which reads like a script to an Outer Limits episode.  Also I’ve made a note to reread “The Ease with Which We Freed the Beast.” It deserves another pass.

If there’s one constant that holds this collection together, it’s the way each story builds. Most of them slowly bring you along, gradually expanding the reader’s suspension of disbelief. There are monsters, sci-fi elements, and ghosts but these stories focus on regular people and even good people are touched by evil.

I’ll leave most of the stories for you to discover without out any advanced warning. That’s the best way to experience a short story anyway. Quick, dark, and scary. They might be better read late at night when the lights are off.

Horror fans will enjoy it. Being scared is fun. Inferno is a nice book to keep up on the shelf and pull down when you’ve got an hour to kill. For a while now, that’s what I’ve been doing.

4