Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Ellen Datlow

All stories in Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural had to conform to one requirement, editor Ellen Datlow (who says she’s not prolific, but she’s just being modest) says in the preface: They had to cause the reader “a sensation of fear so palpable that [he or she] feels impelled to turn up the lights very bright and play music or seek the company of others to dispel that fear.” Whether the pieces in Inferno will freak you out depends on your receptivity to horror and supernatural fiction in general, but they are, for the most part, strongly written and highly memorable.

K. W. Jeter gives us a fiery start with “Riding Bitch,” in which the protagonist finds himself riding his motorcycle with the corpse of his dead girlfriend bound to him by handcuffs. The naked speed of the motorcycle and the fierce grip of his dead lover enact obvious metaphors for the uncontrollable speed and clinging persistence of heavy grief, but I don’t mind obvious metaphors when handled with the hallucinogenic agility of Jeter’s prose. Shreds of zombie stories, fairy tales, and maybe even a bit of absurdism (especially in the roundabout conversations where the characters try to be profound and expressive but hit the frail limits of human expression instead) mix in “Riding Bitch,” drive to a poetic and inevitable crescendo, then explode in a radiant moment of transcendence. The intertwining of sex and death—or, rather, love and self-destruction—doesn’t seem like a Freudian cliché; Jeter uses the subjects to brilliantly portray the altered state of mind of grief. It’s always a hard act to follow in an anthology with such a kick-ass story as its first.

In contrast to “Riding Bitch,” Stephen Gallagher’s “Misadventure” appears kind of flat. Workmen repairing a decrepit gym does not seem like a riveting subject. But when you have a protagonist who’s constantly bugged by ghosts no one else can see, and some of the workmen swear that strange shadows shift in the bottom of the swimming pool, things get more interesting. The aforesaid comparative “flatness” is actually a clever device on Gallagher’s part, an affected calmness of the main character, whose understated, realistic descriptions of events make the unexplained shadows even creepier. Though the protagonist does solve the mystery of the pool haunting, “Misadventure” expands its scope beyond a detective story to explore how the main character makes his peace with the spirits in his life. A melancholy character study, quieter than “Riding Bitch,” but ultimately still as powerful.

In “The Forest” by Laird Barron, Partridge and former associates of Renaissance man and scientist, Toshi Ryoko, gather at Ryoko’s rural New England estate to hear about his latest experimentations with cutting-edge technology. Cockroaches, satellites listening for UFOs, and an eerily preserved ghost town are all involved, as is Partridge’s old flame, Nadine. As Partridge tries to figure out exactly what Ryoko’s goals are, he realizes that he may be able to rescue himself or Nadine from the sinister proceedings, but not both. Luxurious and slow in spreading his backstory, Barron writes in measured, sensual prose that smells of Lovecraft with the sense of ancient, shambling horror. Predictable, but also delicious and satisfying.

Amy and Brian’s young son is missing. The silence of regret and blame settles in their house. Then angels (?) begin falling from the skies and dying, and perhaps things are looking up. Like “Misadventure” and many other stories in this anthology, “The Monsters of Heaven” by Nathan Ballingrud is obsessed with lost chances and absent children, both of which are frail, insubstantial, but which bear huge burdens of meaning. The trite treatment of Amy’s affair aside (”You cold bitch!”/”You passive little shit…You let it happen”), Ballingrud successfully depicts the tragedy of two empty suburban hearts and the seductive, savage narcotic of grief.

The predatory beings of “Inelastic Collisions” lurk beneath the disguises of human women, stalking their prey through a seemingly innocent challenge to a game of pool. Everything goes well until the predators meet a man who won’t submit easily to them. Elizabeth Bear takes the tired conceit of the tragically fallen angel and revives it with sharp prose that revels in the literal grittiness of the human world and its revolting foreignness to the protagonists.

“The Uninvited” by Christopher Fowler is about a sinister kind of groupie shadowing the edges of glittering Hollywood high life. Julius observes that whenever these uninvited guests crash a party, bad things inevitably happen. He begins trailing them slowly throughout the years, trying to find out more about their methods and their purpose. Fowler’s story, largely in summary, spans many decades and attempts to be a world-weary indictment of the evil, the corruption that society lets in its doors without realizing it. However, given little opportunity to invest in the main character (who never confronts any real challenges or has any particularly significant emotional responses) or to take the uninvited guests seriously (sure they kill people, but they also prance around wearing “Satanic death symbols,” which seems rather stereotypical), I found the story lackluster.

Lost children resurface again in Inferno with Mike O’Driscoll’s “13 O’Clock.” A father, Caleb, becomes obsessed with son Jack’s night terrors. The persistence of Jack’s bad dreams turns into an obsession for Caleb and then, inevitably, Caleb himself finds himself trapped in a nightmare. O’Driscoll grounds his characters in thoroughly believable motives—a child’s panic over what he can’t control, a parent’s desire to defend his child against all harm—and then extends circumstances to terrifying extremes to test the characters. The realistic grounding makes Caleb’s irrational obsession understandable, even sympathetic, and, while we are wondering how Caleb will ever save his kid, Caleb’s own damnation sneaks up on us. We swallow the supernatural elements quickly as we fly by on O’Driscoll’s tender, delicate words to reach the inevitable end. Because it can work on both a literal level and a more figurative, symbolic level, O’Driscoll’s investigation of parental instincts is particularly effective and memorable, one of the best in the book.

Death happens whenever Christopher is near. Or, more specifically, Christopher brings death and disaster, but he himself always escapes it. Accidents, disasters, and tragedies consume his family members, but he remains unscathed. His father, the one telling this story in “Lives” by John Grant, becomes increasingly disturbed by Christopher’s continuing unbreakability. Perhaps the two are more similar than the father cares to admit? Grant weaves a suspenseful story about the double-edged sword of superpowers, which bring great good fortune and great loneliness simultaneously, and he successfully balances the portrayal of Christopher so you’re not quite sure if this kid is intentionally destructive. At the same time, the melancholy undercurrent of the father seeing himself in his son’s character gives “Lives” a philosophical and poignant ring.

An odious bibliophile, aptly named Staines (ewww), pries into the hideout of pulp novelist Julius Ghorla, now inhabited by the paranormally obsessed novelist’s ancient sister. Both Staines and rival researcher, Cooper, are competing for little-known information about Ghorla’s weird theories, but Staines arrives at Ghorla’s sister’s house first. Horror befalls him! Author Mark Samuels builds the creeping tension, the damp oppressive atmosphere, and the relentless weirdness of the aforementioned crazy cat lady in “Ghorla” well, but then he reduces the power of these elements in the end. In order to truly appreciate the conclusion’s punch, we should have greater inklings about the eldritch details of Ghorla’s theories. We do not get such details until an inconvenient data dump via diary about two-thirds of the way through the story. By spelling out practically everything, Samuels stops the story’s forward momentum and much of the reader’s interest as well. Even though the crazy cat lady does blab her secrets directly to her diary and thus to you, you should read to the end anyway for a neat conclusion tying all plot elements together and giving Staines a deserved comeuppance for being so annoying.

Joyce Carol Oates contributes a short entitled “Face” to this anthology. It seems to be a stream-of-consciousness, from the viewpoint of a young girl, of a local townswoman who has a “thing” (tumor? deformity?) growing from the side of her neck. The young girl and other kids think that the old woman’s deformity is another head, another face. The possibility that the old woman is a two-faced witch frightens and fascinates the kids and eventually…Well, we’ll just say that it gets under the girl’s skin. Oates uses the framework of an urban legend to tell a tale that’s not so much scary as it is a clear depiction of the way unusual people or things fasten onto us and refuse to let go. Oates’s fluid pacing recalls the ripples and cycles of obsessive thought so well that her story itself becomes as unforgettable as the subject matter.

Lee Thomas, author of “An Apiary of White Bees,” knows that we react to bees the same way that we react to fire. Both bees and fire are pretty to look at, so lively and flashing; both benefit us with their sensual products, either honey or heat. At the same time, both bees and fire never escape being wholly evil, which is to say that they can kill you if you’re not careful. Protagonist Oliver discovers the seductive, dangerous appeal of bees when he unearths some curious casks of a strange honeyed wine from the cellars of an old estate. Visions of the wine’s source bring him insight, hallucination, and power, which lead to a violent, exquisite climax when others refuse to respect Oliver. Thomas writes deeply, lavishly mixing metaphors of drunkenness, sweetness, sexual release, and stings without ever being trite or overdone. He transmutes our instinctive vision of bees=bad, creepy bugs into one of strikingly sensual beauty. (In an added bonus, it’s nice to see a story about a gay character who is not defined by, suffering because of, or limited to his sexual orientation, just as it’s nice, in “Inelastic Collisions” to see a wheelchair-using character who is not defined by, suffering because of, or limited to his wheelchair.)

P. D. Cacek takes a little girl’s perspective in “The Keeper,” wherein Sarah’s family welcomes silent, depressed, skeletal cousin Janna, a survivor of the concentration camps. It’s not just the usual posttraumatic stress disorder haunting Sarah’s cousin. It’s something more vivid….Okay, actually, Cacek would like you to believe that Janna’s condition is more than usual PTSD, but I had a hard time buying it. It looked pretty similar to me, even in the way that her memories ate her from the inside out, consumed her, and even leaked over to mess up Sarah’s life. In fact, despite the subject matter, I didn’t find anything particularly disturbing, horrific, or significant about this story or anything original, unusual, twisty, or metaphorical about the way in which it was told. This is not to say that Cacek writes poorly, just that the story laid all its cards on the table quickly:

“There was a girl who came to live with us, and she was haunted by the Holocaust, and then I was too”

And then just left them there. In the end, I was much more interested in Sarah’s boisterous, chattering, argumentative relatives than in the tragic, but flatly described, Janna.

Paul Finch enters “Bethany’s Wood” following Terri and Mark on their way to visit a New Age author. Mark is convinced that the reclusive writer is actually his mom, who went off the map years ago after leaving Mark’s dad for a woman. As they approach the manse in Bethany’s Wood, Mark and Terri glimpse artistic, robot-like creatures that strangely resemble Mark and Terri themselves. What’s going on here? In a word: misogyny. I really have nothing against stories about insane, control-freaky lesbians per se, but they have to be done well and provide some sort of spin or rumination other than the fact that insane, control-freaky lesbians are bad news. However, Mark’s mom and her partner are dully stereotypical, Goddess-worshipping man-haters, and the story’s only perspective on them is Mark’s—who hates them with a venomous passion. Thus the story sounds a single note of shrill hatred for women that overbears any other elements in it.

We’ve all got a beast inside us, made of animal appetites and deadly sins. Some of us keep it caged, but it’s so simple to let it out, as the characters of “The Ease With Which We Freed the Beast” by Lucius Shepard discover. They are drugged-up teenagers who, in their boredom, let loose a vicious monster, but that’s not the source of horror. No, the horror comes from the main character and his relationship, part predator, part prey, with the beast. Shepard starts off “The Ease…” in a loose, rambly way, appropriate to his stoned protagonist, but the harshness of the boy’s barely concealed brutality pokes through, chilling you. Scenes become tighter, faster, and shorter as the story goes on, building to a conclusion that comments on not just societal ills, but also on the way violence creeps through familial lines.

In “Hushabye,” you can’t defeat the vampires with a well-placed karate kick or a stake. They’re tougher than the creatures of recent TV fame…more perverted too. The one that Poole is tracking in Simon Bestwick’s tale is more like a pederast, feeding on kids. This is a stark, sharp vengeance story with appropriately horrific monsters and appropriately jaded, morally ambiguous cops and a nice splattery ending. Yum.

“Perhaps the Last” by Conrad Williams centers on Garner, museum guard on the night watch in a museum full of clocks. To pass the time, he imagines himself an inamorata, chatting regularly to her so that she develops into a robust character. But then she seems to be developing a life of her own, and all those ticking, ticking timepieces drive Garner to morbid thoughts of mortality. An odd, somewhat confusing tale, “Perhaps the Last” recalls the hectic, lugubrious paranoia of some of Poe’s shorts. Also, as with Poe, however, I think I need an annotated guide to discern what Williams’s compelling, yet also murky, tangle of images (in which a heart is “a twitching fist of meat that clung to her chest”—awesome!) signifies.

Next we’ve got “Stilled Life” by Pat Cadigan, in which forty-something Lee befriends a high-school-dropout, Sophie. Sophie performs as a living statue in the parks, which seems okay to Lee until Sophie starts appearing more stone-like and less life-like, and she’s got this new greasy manager guy who seems to be driving her to an eating disorder. Nice concept, but “Stilled Life” drags in the middle, as Lee is slow on the uptake to realize that something is really wrong with Sophie. Furthermore, since both Lee and Sophie are rather unlikable—Lee maternal and micromanaging, Sophie solipsistic and self-abnegating—I cared more about what drew the two together in their dysfunctional friendship in the first place than the fact that Sophie’s statue work was becoming pathological. I would have cared more about the horror elements if the characters had a convincing psychological framework upon which to develop said horror. But, because they didn’t, I was too distracted by their lack of convincingness to pay attention to much else.

Glen Hirshberg has a wonderful setting for “The Janus Tree,” which takes place in Silver City, Montana. Formerly a boom town, but not quite a ghost town, Silver City is more like a bust town, a declining city scarred physically and internally by the mining that once drove its economy. In the same way that Silver City is haunted by the mines, so main character Teddy is haunted by the silent, grim Matt, son of the local business tycoon. In high school English class, Teddy competes with Matt for the affections of Jill, but Matt grows increasingly violent and meets an end more tragic than scary, although it is scary in that existential way when you reflect how the despair of a city can get into your soul, how your family’s demands can dog you, possess you…. This is a story with a very long, slow-burning fuse that gathers its menacing detail bit by bit so that you barely notice when you slip over from your average horrors of high school to something more sinister. The climax explodes so quickly that it’s difficult to appreciate what’s going on, but read this one again, and savor the dense character study.

“The Bedroom Light” is really funny. In this story by Jeffrey Ford, Bill and Allison can’t sleep because something always makes too much noise or otherwise distracts them. In their insomnia, they bitch about their possibly haunted house and their nutso neighbors, then gradually switch to reminiscences, bad dreams, and their symbolism, and now the cat’s acting deranged…I seriously couldn’t find any plot or point or anything remotely chilling, suspenseful, supernatural, and/or horrific about this, but I went along with it because it was a fast-moving sketch of two fully fleshed, charming people whose conversations seemed like real ones, transcribed, even though they were stylized, clenched, and honed through Ford’s enviable skill.

Meteors, suits of armor, an accidental death of a child, and a long-lived desire for vengeance come together in Terry Dowling’s “The Suits at Auderlene.” On the trail of the fabled Pratican Star meteor, reporter Neville investigates its disappearance with townie Gilly, who grew up with stories of the Star. They’re not supposed to poke around the Pratican estate after dark, but, when they do, they learn that grudges and their effects can last long after a person is dead, and Nev and Gilly have to clean it up. This surprisingly sprightly story tweaks the conventions of a Horrific Discovery trope a bit, but mostly it’s a solid, entertaining entry in that subgenre, distinguished by careful consideration of character.

Publisher: Tor Books (December 2007)
Price: $17.13
Hardcover: 384 pages
ISBN: 0765315580