Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2007 Edition, edited by Angela Challis

Edited by Angela Challis, Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2007 Edition is the latest in an ever-burgeoning sub-genre of books which could be described as “Subscription-Lite.” The reader can, by buying eight, nine, or ten individual books, save themselves the cost and time spent reading all the magazines and anthologies from which their contents are culled.

The title itself is confusing, since the stories were actually published in 2006, but presumably will become less important as the series progresses, and readers grow familiar with it.

Terry Dowling’s “Cheat Light” opens the anthology. One of the stronger pieces, it’s about a photographer trying to track down the subject of some mysterious photographs taken on an isolated part of the Australian coast. What sets it apart is Dowling’s detailed use of photography and types of light to build atmosphere, although the trapdoors through which the reader falls could perhaps be better spaced.

“Under Hell, Over Heaven” by Margo Lanagan is the only one of the stories that overlaps with other Year’s Best, notably Jonathan Strahan’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Vol 2. A group of the dead must make their way across a bureaucratic afterlife. It’s no less bleak than the first time I read it; while effective, it’s not especially likeable.

Unlike “Dead of Winter” by Stephen Dedman, which is one of the few stories in the book which was first published outside Australia, in Weird Tales, and deservedly won Australia’s Aurealis Award for Best Horror Short Story. An American researcher and her uptight English assistant ghost hunt in the U.S. Bible Belt for entries for her Encyclopaedia of the Undead, with entirely unexpected results. Funny, charming, and one of the nicest stories of the year, Australian or otherwise.

Robert Hood’s “In the Service of the Flesh,” has perhaps the finest opening line in the anthology. A man mutated by a radiation overdose into a flesh-eating zombie is visited by a pair of evangelists who get a different taste of the afterlife than that which they were expecting. It’s alternately funny and stomach-churning, and even manages to offer a moment of poignancy.

Sadly, while there are good stories in Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2007 Edition, there are also an awful lot not up to the standard of “The Best.” Generally speaking, the longer stories tend to work better, although there are exceptions: “The Bat’s Boudoir” by Kyla Ward is a lovely, stylish little piece about the relationship between the hunter and their prey, while “Ache” by David Witteveen—one of the longest stories in the book—is as overwritten as one would expect of a story culled from Hardboiled Cthulhu. The characterization is uneven, and, to be frank, I have a dislike of first-person narratives ending in immolation—the pedant in me wants to know how the narrative happens.

But too many of the stories are too short to allow the authors to explore their narratives to their full potential. “Horror is bad things happening to good people,” may be a cliché, but it’s also true. Flash-fictions like Steven Cavanagh’s “Finding the Words,” Kirstyn McDermott’s “Cold,” and “The Sidpa Bardo” by Nathan Burrage, all of which are less than a couple thousand words long, are too short to allow any real empathy with their protagonists.

By contrast, “Tarans” by Simon Brown could do with some editorial trimming of its overwritten, pseudo-Victorian dialogue. Deborah Biancotti’s “Surrender 1: Rope Artist” is more style than substance and, like “Pain Threshold” by Jason Nahrung, is concerned with examining the infliction of pain.

Jay Caselberg’s “Empties” is a suburban allegory of alienation that’s effective without being especially memorable, while “The Garden Shed Pact” by Shane Jiraiya Cummings is another story about the relationship between hunter and prey, but is never really credible. “Iron Shirt” by Susan Wardle tells of a near future, beyond “The Terror Years,” but never really establishes how we got from this world to that, nor gives any rationale for such a punishment, leaving the story feeling wholly artificial. “Father Father” by Paul Haines is a one-punch story that telegraphs its end less than halfway through its short length.

The pick of the stories are those already mentioned, by Dedman, Dowling, and Hood, together with two others: Chris Lawson’s “Hieronymous Boche” is yet another visit to the trenches of the First World War, but with a topological twist worthy of an Interzone piece, while “The Red Priest’s Vigil” is an L. Sprague de Camp-esque sword-and-sorcery Renaissance romp, written by the appropriately named Dirk Flinthart, full of both martial and dark arts, and characterized by language so rich it almost causes indigestion. Both in their very different ways are excellent stories.

But in terms of the whole book, I have several reservations. While the ever-increasing availability of such anthologies should be a source of delight—in that it seems to prove the doubters wrong; that there is a market for such anthologies—there is the danger that in siphoning off readers’ funds to buy them, they may end up eroding the very sources for their material. More pertinently to this particular anthology, there is a double standard at work in seeking to promote materials to the outside world that were first published predominantly in closed markets. And in broad, international terms, this is only a so-so collection.

Generally speaking, while the better stories in Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2007 Edition are as good as anything from overseas, there’s a feeling that to fill a whole book, Angela Challis has had to pull in less noteworthy material. Overall, the quality of the anthology is on a par with—for example—British anthologies such as John Carnell’s New Writings in SF from the 1960s and 70s, or George Zebrowski’s Synergy series from the 80s. Competent enough, but collectively hardly memorable, little of lasting memory, and, in this case, an expensive package for what it is.

If Australian SF wants wider exposure, then it really needs to set its standards against the wider world, not retreat into a cosy ghetto.

Publisher: Brimstone Press (Dec. 2007)
Price: $24.95 (AUD)
Paperback: 224 pages
ISBN: 18354904