Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Tachyon
November, 2016
Reviewed by Michael R. Collings
One approaches an anthology edited by Ellen Datlow with a number of assumptions. First, it will represent the wide reading and decades of experience that make Datlow a premier editor of all things dark. Second, it will tap into the most recent trends in dark fiction, demonstrating the shifting paradigms for narrative, characterization, themes, and language. And third, while all of the twenty-four tales (in this case) will have something to offer, among them there will be gems that trigger shivers and dread.
Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror fulfills these assumptions. Highlighting stories from 2005—the closing date for her previous Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror—through 2015, the anthology provides glimpses into a period of accelerated change in the genre and in how it is viewed and accepted by a wider and wider readership. It acknowledges the increasing awareness of diversity, as challenge and as goal, and the role it plays within the genre. It gives place on the stage to a variety of approaches and treatments…not all of which will please all readers but all of which will give pause for thought and consideration.
Exploring the contents, readers will find in Mark Samuels’ “Shallaballah” an unsettling re-working of the traditional Punch-and-Judy motif, and a world in which it takes on horrific implications. Veteran story-teller Gene Wolfe puts the horror writer in the spotlight in “Sob in the Silence,” in which creating dark fiction and living within it uncomfortably merge. Brian Hodge’s “Our Turn Too Will One Day Come” anatomizes power and wealth, focusing on the cost and consequences for succeeding generations…as well as on a fascinating creature called the “yird swine” and its gruesome task.
Kaaron Warren’s “Dead Sea Fruit” introduces the Ash Mouth Man, who, the narrator notes, may or may not be a myth circulated among the anorexic but who, in the context of the story, takes on a frightful reality that leads to a desperate act. Lisa Tuttle’s “Closet Dreams” is in some senses a fairly traditional tale of abduction and fantastic escape, until the final the final, terrifying moment. Nicholas Royle’s “Very Low-Flying Aircraft” juxtaposes a moment of domestic horror with something infinitely worse, made even more distressing by the delicately poetic scene in the closing paragraph.
Margo Lanagan’s “The Goosle” is a discomforting re-imagining of what is already a deeply disquieting children’s tale—it is definitely not for all tastes in its mixture of contemporary language and concerns over sexuality and sexual identity with a story structure hundreds of years old.
Steve Duffy’s “The Clay Party” provides a fictional counterpart to the historical Donner Party, using diary entries and news reports to reconstruct a tale of misjudgment and pride that lead to suffering, starvation, death…and worse. While intriguing from the beginning, the story takes on additional resonance with the final journal entry, allowing readers to go back and review the story with new and deeper understanding of what is happening.
In Stephen Graham Jones’ “Lonegan’s Luck,” the devil (albeit a human one) receives his due when a highly ambitious thief falls prey to his own greed and obsession. The power of experience and memory provides the center for Anna Taborska’s “Little Pig,” in which the simple act of dropping a pair of glasses activates a flash-back shocking in its implications for a lifetime of remembrance.
“Shay Corsham Worsted,” by Garth Nix is an eerie tale of an old man whose habitual patterns of action are beginning to change, to the dismay of the octogenarian Sir David, who alone understands the consequence of that change for the world and who must somehow convince those around him of their impending doom.
Richard Kadrey’s “Ambitious Boys Like You” completes the collection with a chilling tale of a robbery gone terribly wrong. Even though the old house is supposed to be haunted, the old recluse living there is must surely be sitting on hoarded wealth, so what better target for two amateur thieves. They rapidly discover, of course, that things are not always as they appear…and they pay dearly for their ignorance.
(Kadrey’s story was among the more powerful for me because it demonstrates the malleability of horror and its tropes. Earlier this year, my son Michaelbrent published The House that Death Built, a novel based on a similar premise: a home invasion, the promise—or illusion—of great wealth for little effort, the gradual awareness that being a thief does not preclude one from also being prey. The two stories conclude entirely differently, of course, yet in detail show how two writers can use analogous elements, turning them into unique, individual narratives.)
Each story in Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror does indeed represent a “nightmare,” although the definition of that word shifts within each. Some deal with worlds like ours, twisted in one detail to force characters to face impossiblities. Others take place in fantastic worlds, where the impossible is an everyday event and horror, therefore, must must reach beyond to terrify. Readers will find sufficient entertainment, frequent enough moments of frisson, ample enough opportunities to challenge preconceptions, to make the book worth reading.
