having an affection for ghost stories and horror in general (it's probably my favorite genre), i recently picked up ellen datlow's latest horror anthology, "the dark: new ghost stories," which supposedly won some awards and shit. it's okay.
there's fifteen or sixteen short- and mid-length stories in the anthology. short form is almost always the best form for horror work, since it requires a sustained crescendo -- a huge fat parabola of tension -- that longer forms just cannot maintain. it's why king's and barker's short stories are, by and large, better than their novels when it comes to straight-up horror. "carrie" is about as long as you can get and keep the fever pitch going without adding elaborate local mythologies or gothic fantasy twists to the formula -- both of which diminish the impact of the "horror" even as they entertain.
the anthology is hit-and-miss. tanith lee's "the ghost in the clock" is a total reeker; it's collegiate creative writing crap, like the shit your dumb goth girlfriend used to write your freshman year minus the gay vampires. i've never much liked lee's work, though, because i've always felt her stories were too simple and too reliant on the big bugaboo reveal. this story doesn't deviate from the formula, and the implausible characters make it doubly obnoxious. other stinkers include "the dead ghost" and "the hortlak," the latter of which was too snarky and silly, and inappropriately placed at the end of the collection. i suppose it was placed thusly to prepare the reader for "dancing men," which is a morbid henry james style take on the holocaust, but it actually just irritated rather than amused me.
speaking of "dancing men," it was apparently the most lauded tale of the lot, and won some awards. i'll be honest -- i found it boring and a bit preachy. of course, east coast literary types feel obligated to praise anything holocaust-y, because omg omg could there be any greater evil perpetrated by man in modern memory? the fundamental conceit of the story itself is darkly eerie -- the meme of the holocaust made manifest to haunt the family of a survivor -- but FUCK if the author had saved the holocaust bit for the big reveal instead of dryly scraping every last bit of tortured imagery from it, it mighta elicited something other than weariness from me.
on to what i liked! i saw in the amazon reviews that folks found "the silence of the falling stars" dull, but i liked that it was completely oblique. i think it did an effective job of expressing its spooky element: a sense of being lost in the real world and within one's own self, and the encroaching dread -- even in open sunlight -- that attends it, until you reach a state of such utter apathy that you might be capable of horror yourself. as henry james illustrated, the best horror doesn't need a freaky space spider jumping out of your closet. i also liked the likewise reviled "the thing about the night," because it was a nice "hard" take on the study of ghosts, with a sort of modern lovecraftian vibe. also, mirrors freak the fuck out of me. not because i expect to see some eyeless bloody mary like shit staring back at me late at night, but because they reflect the world imperfectly and play havoc with my sense of reality. color me quaintly victorian, but the idea of standing between two mirrors makes my skin crawl. where the fuck am i! ANYWAY.
other good stories include "the trentino kid," an almost hemingway-esque story that is a LITTLE heavy-handed with its metaphor of being "adrift" but still manages to stay very cohesive and spooky. "an amicable divorce" is also good, and reads like a better stephen king short. "doctor hood" is kinda mediocre in style, but it had a darkly funny angle: the idea that the living can torment the dead. the mandatory joyce carol oates entry is "the subway," one of her better works, although like much of her stuff, it aims for the feminine travails angle first and the horror second. lastly, i did like "limbo" despite the initial "dude on the run from a dark past goes into wilderness" cliche; it turns deviously dire in the end and concluded more satisfactorily than i expected.
the rest of the stories are eminently forgettable; harmless throwaway fluff notable only for their mild pretentiousness or their predictability. i give this anthology 3 shrieking harpie coworkers whose nightmarish laughter and flesh-crawling inadequacy torment my waking hours out of 5!
