mix of short stories and poems that may not have you shaking in your seat, but will definitely give you a well-rounded overview of the state of the Canadian genre lit landscape. Favouring strange, unique and metaphorical tales over blood-spattered ones, it would seem
after last year’s jaunt, which was possibly the most visceral Tesseracts to date (RM#97), the focus is returning to the parabolic and otherworldly. Patrick Johan- neson’s “Heat Death or Answering the Ouroboros Question” is told from the perspective of a god tired of the ceaseless phi- losophizing of his associates and their inability to answer any of the universe’s hard questions. Michael R. Colangelo’s “Rocketship Red” takes a mere three pages to tell the tale of a young kite-flyer who grows up to become an astronaut that flies into a mysterious space rift. Here, Colangelo relies on the Lovecraftian suggestion that true terror exists in the unknown by ending the story just as the protagonist is about to face the nebulous horrors. There are, however, more macabre entries, as well. Daniel Sernine’s “Nights in White Linen” involves a group of undead monsters that have adapted to eating em- balmed human flesh from corpses stolen from medical facili- ties, and M.L.D. Curelas’ “Harvest Moon” contains one of the most terrifying scenes in the entire collection, told from the perspective of a young boy as a pack of werewolves board the bed of his father’s pickup while he helplessly waits inside. While Tesseracts 14 is diverse enough that there’s something for everyone, that doesn’t nec-
essarily make for an entertaining read overall. Not all horror fans, for instance, will want to brush up on Roman mythology before reading a few poems (as is almost demanded by Sandra Kasturi’s “The Medusa Quintet”), nor will all want their fright fiction infused with fantasy and allegory. So if you’re looking for an easy pulp or an unrelenting nail-biter, look elsewhere. What this collection will give you is a sampling of Canada’s contemporary crop of strange storytellers and a broad idea of where speculative Canadian lit might be heading in the years to come.
JESSA SOBCZUK SUB ROSA English author Robert Aickman, who had seven original collections published during his lifetime
(1914-1981), and one more posthumously, described his stories not as horror or as supernatural, but as “strange.” In these strange stories, characters wander into “seemingly normal regions that are somehow
wrong.” The effect often leaves one with a sense of oblique discomfort, the exact cause of which is not easily identifiable – if at all. Aickman’s stories generally don’t have tidy resolutions, which can be a source of consternation for some readers. But as Ray Russell explains in his introduction, “Aickman seems to give us more than enough clues to the puzzles he offers in his tales, and yet they do not quite account for all that happens in them.” Originally published in 1968, Sub Rosa is the first of Tartarus
Press’ planned Aickman reprints (though it was actually his fourth collection to be published). Still, this volume of eight stories serves as a fine introduction to the author’s distinctive body of work. The lead offering, “Ravissante,” tells of a precocious young
painter whose soul might have been destroyed by the increas- ingly bizarre advances of a lascivious old woman, “curiously uncouth in her movements.” In “The Inner Room,” a young woman encounters a life-sized but dilapidated version of her childhood dollhouse, occupied by flesh-and-blood, slightly de- ranged projections of the house’s toy occupants. “The Unset- tled Dust,” perhaps Aickman’s most straightforward ghost
story, is set in an old house occupied by two reclusive sisters. The story’s narrator, their temporary lodger, observes a thick, unexplainable pall of dust that settles over everything and encounters a portentous figure that he is assured only appears once to each witness. Like Poe, Le Fanu, Machen and Lovecraft, Aickman is the progenitor of a certain style of horror:
the strange story – a style which is widely imitated but rarely replicated with the same precision. His writing is sophisticated, confounding and unnerving in equal measure; extreme and diverse reactions to his work are to be expected, but it is for these same reasons that he still attracts so many admirers.
BRIAN J. SHOWERS T PREDICTIONS 2011
his past year has been a turbulent one for publish- ing – and the horror genre
was certainly not spared the brunt of what appears to be an industry-wide upheaval. With Amazon’s announcement ear- lier this year that eBooks are now outselling hardcovers on its sites, publishers have been scrambling to determine what people want and in what for- mat. But the tail end of a re- cession is not necessarily a good time to talk innovation and long-term investment. To that end, 2010 also brought mon- umental changes to several long-time horror publishers, among them Necro Publications, which announced an indefinite hiatus, and Leisure Books, which has all but discontinued its popular mass market paperback line in favour of eBook and print-on- demand releases. Yes, the times are a-changin’, so I thought, for this first LotD column of 2011, that I would ask some bookish folks about what they believe the fright fiction landscape is going to look like in the coming year. Here’s what they told me...
BRIAN KEENE author of The Rising and A Gathering of Crows “I see horror fiction, in its published form, undergoing the same sort of transition it went through in the early ’90s. ... It’s becom- ing harder to sell a horror novel to a mainstream publisher, unless it has a zombie or a teen vampire in it. As a result, you’re seeing many professional, veteran authors opting for the digital, do-it- yourself route. And I think that will be just as successful as the small press push was back in the ’90s.”
DAVID B. SILVA editor at
hellnotes.com “I suspect horror will at last move away from zombies and into new territory. With the digital book revolution, both established and new writers will begin to explore new [ground], feeling em- powered by a closer connection to their readers. I’m an optimist, so I tend to believe the horror genre will go through a dramatic expansion over the next couple of years as it attracts new read- ers with less gore and more intellectually interesting concepts.”
COLUM MCKNIGHT avid reader/blogger at
paperbackhorror.com “More authors are playing with cross-genre fiction, including horror/thriller hybrids, weird west, erotic horror, etc., leading to some of the best works we’ve seen in quite some time. Room is being made for newcomers like Nate Southard, Joel A. Sutherland, Nate Kenyon and James Roy Daley – [of] Books of the Dead Press – all of whom have proven com- pletely capable of picking up and dusting off an obviously frustrated and disillusioned core audience and injecting some very needed new blood into the genre. ... Readers can gen- uinely bet on a very exciting, eye-opening and groundbreaking year ahead.”
MONICA S. KUEBLER T H E N I N T H C I R C L E 57 RM
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