Nasty and Brutish Shorts: Reading & Writing Short Horror Fiction

                                                                                                 We're back on the Darker Side today with the back half of John Pelan's second "Darkside" anthology. This is a low floor, high ceiling situation, with some masterpieces and some gravely flawed trifles, and everything in between. I like these Pelan books , and I'm going to keep reviewing them, but the quality is really all over the place. That's exacerbated by the fact that the first half of the book is the stronger half by far, although we have some heavy hitters here who bring up the average.  Also--it's been a while since I've added one of these content warnings (and overall this book is much tamer th...

                                                                                                           It's been feeling a little. . . respectable. . .around here lately. We've been on a diet of Ellen Datlow anthologies and Charlie Grant quiet horrors , and while there's been more than a little evisceration and exsanguination, let's switch it up. Let's flick that selector switch all the way to full-auto. Let's rock and roll with another John Pelan Darkside anthology! The late John Pelan edited a bunch of anthologies, including five that, while not a formal series to my knowledge, all contain some variation of the phrase "Darkside" or "Dark Side", and were all publishe...

                                                                                                      Let's do this. Spoiler alert: These stories are all good.  Blessed Mary by Stephen Volk Synopsis : An expectant mother brings her husband to her Welsh hometown for Christmas, but the tradition of the Mari Lwyd, together with a secret from her past, may spoil everything. Thoughts : It would suck to be a Stephen Volk story set at Christmas because you're always going to be compared to your successful big brother Ghostwatch . Volk gave us one of the greatest bits of British Christmas horror several decades ago with that terrifying, reality-warping BBC special; if you haven't seen it, y...

                                                                                                                   I've written before about the mixed feelings I had when I was getting back into horror fiction after college and I encountered the first few of Ellen Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year series (something of a spiritual successor to her important work on the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series). "Where's the horror?" I asked myself at the time. In retrospect, I think it was always there and I needed to expand my notions of horror a bit.  No mixed feelings today, though: The first half of this book is great (the second half is t...

I was excited for Day , since the concept--horror set in and/or about the day--is a challenging and creative one. There are three categories of story here: Ones about the day and the daylight as such as the setting for horror (this is what I expected going in). Ones about light as such, but not necessarily day . Ones that seem to be using daytime and taking place during the day as a way to juxtapose horrific content with the quotidian. As before, I'll be noting how diurnal each seems to be.  The Bright Day by Priya Sharma Synopsis : The UK of the future is a sun-scorched wasteland full of cults and scavengers. How Diurnal Is It ? Type 1. This story has to take place in the daytime, and it was the obvious choice as opener for the Day section. Light, brightness, and daytime are all the subjects of horror, possibly even on a supernatural level. Thoughts : This is a grim, Mad Max as horror story tale in the vein of The Road . The first section is good and tense, and cinematic without ...