Gothic horror and irreverent humour colour 16 tales of intrigue

IN the first of the 16 short stories which make up Emma Ennis’s High Heels and Eulogies an innocuous household accident leads to a global pandemic, a deadly disease which renders sufferers catatonic, their limbs suspended inward so they resemble a crab, a spider, something similarly inhuman.

They remain like this for a day or two and then they die.

This might not make ideal reading for those concerned about our current state of emergency, but if you like your fiction dark, Gothic and laced with irreverent humour then it sets the tone for what’s to follow.

Emma’s third collection of short stories, High Heels and Eulogies features all the usual suspects, all the characters you’d expect from a contemporary horror writer; the bloodthirsty vampires, creepy old ladies, things which go bump in the night, monsters, demons, and the fairies.

Yet rather than ape the familiar tropes of the genre, soak her tales in blood and gore, the author takes a more subtle approach, leaving much of the violence, the nasty stuff, to the reader’s imagination.

And sometimes, not always, she chooses to lampoon those who’ve haunted the collective nightmares of children the world over, poking fun at the ghosts and ghouls we love to hate, humanising them, revealing their weaknesses, insecurities, soft spots.

The result is an entirely eclectic compilation of work, a running order which veers from the macabre and sinister to the thoughtful and provocative, and leaves the reader never quite sure what to expect next.

In The Matter of The Boy a bereaved man returns to the family home to discover he has acquired a sibling since he last visited.

This sibling, a young boy named Colburn, is uncommunicative in the extreme, a silent, brooding presence who makes a habit of appearing out of nowhere, usually where he’s least wanted.

There are shades of The Omen in this story, that sense of an innocent child, someone who should, by virtue of their stature, be protected but ultimately must be protected from.

No sooner have we digested its conclusion when we are thrown headlong into Raising the Roobling and a setting which can only be described as Robot Wars for monsters.

In this festival of the bizarre, a Minotaur competes alongside an alien, a gorgon, a vampire, Frankenstein’s monster and a Cyclops for a token, a trinket hanging from the ceiling. While he does so he is cheered and jeered by the masses, by the humans who have paid good money to see these wretched animals make fools of themselves for their pleasure.

This hint at social commentary runs through Emma’s work, in stories like A Life for a Life where man’s deepest desire comes with the greatest of sacrifices, in Stone Cold Love Story and its sense of regret at an opportunity gone to waste, and in Joyeux Páques where the sins of an entire community return to haunt them each calendar year.

And at each turn, when the sinner, whatever their form, receives their comeuppance, it is because they deserve to do so, because they had it coming.

Those sinners come in many forms, from the power-hungry businesswoman who treats her employees like dirt, to the drug dealer who deals his own retribution, and the unfaithful husband who cannot escape his infidelities no matter where he goes.

There is even room for a priest, a man of the cloth, to find himself slap bang in the middle of an orgy, one of two orgies to take place across the 16 stories.

However, in spite of the occasionally shocking, maybe even sacrilegious nature of its content, High Heels and Eulogies rarely feels gratuitous, rarely shocks for shocks’ sake.

What it does do is take the reader upon a journey, it takes them back in time, to alternate realities and fantastical worlds, and once it has them there it works on burrowing into their psyches, using these 16 short stories to make them reflect upon our own world, our own reality, pandemic and all.