Nasty and Brutish Shorts: Reading & Writing Short Horror Fiction

                                                                                                   After a long absence from Oxrun Station, Grant returned one last time to his scary New England town. And so do we--if you're just joining us now, see coverage of Nightmare Seasons ,   The Orchard , and  Dialing the Wind at the respective links! Spoilers follow, more so than for the other entries. So just go read the dang book, it's not that hard to track down, and all of these are very worthwhile! Prologue Synopsis : Oxrun Station's new chief of police, Derick Stockton, comes from a long line of Stocktons who've led the Station's finest, but he's not himself a native of the town. A few cit...

                                                                                                                                                                                                       We're back with the best of the Oxrun Quartet. The only quibble I have here is that the ostensible throughline (the mysterious music) doesn't quite work; it sets up a neat stinger at the end but that's it. H...

                                                                                            The Orchard was the first of the Oxrun Quartet I read, based on Will Errickson's coverage of it. It's also, unfortunately, the weakest.  Weak is a relative term when talking about Grant's work; some of the stuff here is as strong as ever, but the issue is consistency. There are exciting set-ups, terrifying middles, and all-star endings in The Orchard , but never all three in the same story. But still. . .let's go apple-picking! Prologue  Synopsis : Oxrun Station's police chief, the venerable Abe Stockton, is dying. He takes his friend (Grant?) out to the titular orchard and hands him some documents to read, all rela...

                                                                                                      October is time for quiet and atmospheric horror, and while many people have done, are doing, and will do it well, there's only one Charles L. Grant. Among the man's many atmospheric horror books are four collections of linked novellas (sometimes closely linked, sometimes much less so) which fall somewhere between "collection of stories" and "paste-up novel": Nightmare Seasons, Dialing the Wind, The Orchard , and The Black Carousel .  All of these are set in Grant's haunted, affluent enclave of Oxrun Station, Connecticut, and each consists of four novellas, along with framing prolog...

                                                                                                         Being a critic of horror anthologies in a world where Ellen Datlow is as active as she is...well, it's a curse, and a blessing.  A curse, because no sooner have you tackled one of her books than another one hits your shelves, leaving you in the literary equivalent of the situation in "Something to Tide You Over." A blessing, because Datlow consistently assembles, whether in reprints or originals, some of the highest caliber writing in the dark fantastic.  This time it's Halloween, although there's a slight twist: As Lisa Morton points out in her foreword, while Hal...

                                                                                                      I've been excited about this one for a while, in no small part based on that cover. It looks exactly like I love about the Ramsey Campbell school of British horror, so when I saw Frank was giving out review ARCs, I snatched one up. I'm glad I did, because this is an entertaining and spooky collection.  Also, do yourself a favor, and read my last review somewhere in the middle. I'm saying that for a specific reason. I really don't like the last story here at all, but I also really liked this book and I feel bad about ending on a down note. I mean it. Don't read it first, either--it'l...