A RENAISSANCE FOR SCARY STORIES
Horror authors embrace the dark side in a banner year of titles, Bill Sheehan writes.
Given the amount of first-rate fiction, it’s difficult, perhaps foolish, to designate any one volume as “best of the year.” But let’s be foolish and do it anyway. For me, the book of the year — the one title any serious horror reader needs to own — is Thomas Tessier’s massive retrospective, World of Hurt: Selected Stories (Macabre Ink, 2019), which assembles 28 stories and novellas from a quietly distinguished 40-year career. Each story in this collection resonates. Each, without exception, is chilling, unsettling and beautifully composed. Tessier’s one of the genre’s reigning masters, and World of Hurt may prove to be the centrepiece of his legacy.
Overall, 2019 was a particularly strong year for dark fiction collections. Joe Hill’s generous second collection, Full Throttle: Stories (William Morrow, 2019), offers 13 varied tales that have the impact of compact novels. A notable example is the collaborative chiller In the Tall Grass, recently filmed by Netflix. In two slender collections, Nathan Ballingrud has emerged as one of the field’s most accomplished short story writers. His latest collection is Wounds: Six Stories From the Border of Hell (Gallery/saga Press, 2019), and it lives up to the title. The novella, The Visible Filth, in which a lost cellphone leads a New Orleans bartender to a horrific denouement, has recently been made into a film titled Wounds. Both versions are worth your attention.
The always reliable John Langan weighed in with his third and best collection to date, Sefira and Other Betrayals (Hippocamus Press, 2019). The title piece, a short novel about a woman’s cross-country pursuit of the sexual succubus who has upended her life, is a beautifully crafted gem. Finally, in Song for the Unravelling of the World (Coffee House Press), Brian Evenson offers up 22 superbly rendered slices of fear, uncertainty and paranoia.
Horror novels also made an impressive showing in 2019. Chuck Wendig’s massive Wanderers (Del Rey, 2019), concerns the outbreak of a sleepwalking plague whose cause and purpose remain obscure. Comparisons to Stephen King’s The Stand are inevitable but ultimately beside the point. The book’s nearly 800 pages fly effortlessly by and offer both first-class entertainment and a clear-eyed view of the forces dividing contemporary society. I found myself thinking: Where has this guy been all my life?
One of the most-anticipated — and high-risk — projects of the year comes from author-publisher Richard Chizmar. Gwendy’s Magic Feather (Cemetery Dance, 2019), is a novel-length sequel to Gwendy’s Button Box, a novella written in collaboration with Stephen King and set in the heart of King ’s fictional backyard: Castle Rock, Maine. Both volumes deal with Gwendy Peterson’s stewardship of a doomsday machine, and Chizmar carries the tale forward into Gwendy’s future with sympathy and grace. The result is both an independent creation and a particularly intimate form of collaboration, one that could have gone badly wrong. But Chizmar’s voice and sensibility dovetail neatly with King’s own distinctive style, and the book reads like a newly discovered chapter in King ’s constantly evolving fictional universe.
One of the most heartening developments of recent years has been the re-emergence of Britain’s Kim Newman and of his signature creation, the Anno Dracula novels. The series, which began in the early 1990s and now extends to six volumes, is based on the premise that Van Helsing and company, heroes of Bram Stoker’s original novel, failed to defeat Dracula, ushering in an alternate world in which Dracula is ascendant, and vampirism has taken hold across the world. The latest instalment, Anno Dracula 1999: Daikaiju (Titan Books, 2019), takes place in Tokyo on the eve of the millennium and is as readable and ingenious as any of the previous volumes.
The health of a genre depends on its ability to attract gifted new writers, and the past year has seen the emergence of numerous talented first novelists. Tinfoil Butterfly (MCD x FSG Originals, 2019), by Rachel Eve Moulton is a visceral account of two lost souls — a desperate young woman and a sexually confused girl — confronting external dangers and internal pressures in the Black Hills of South Dakota. In Soon, (Titan Books 2019), Australia’s Lois Murphy posits a world in which an entire community is decimated by lethal forces hiding in the darkness. The Killing Moon (PS Publishing, 2019), by Welsh novelist Allister Timms, sets the ancient Germanic legend of the Erl-king against the backdrop of war-torn Europe.
Fantasy writer T. Kingfisher’s horror debut, The Twisted Ones (Gallery, Saga Press, 2019), connects contemporary regional horror with the work of the great Welsh fantasist Arthur Machen. Shaun Hamill’s A Cosmology of Monsters (Pantheon, 2019), leads off with the most compelling opening sentence of the year (“I started collecting my older sister Eunice’s suicide notes when I was seven years old”) and goes on to create a seamless merger of horror and family tragedy.
With the advent of so many distinctive voices, the horror renaissance seems likely to continue. The world around us may be out of control, but the future of dark fiction seems bright and secure. I look forward to what comes next.