This is the brief at the smoldering heart of Inferno: to provide the reader with a heart-pounding moment of shock or dread. But horror is about more than that jolt, and the majority of stories in Inferno work well because the writers are willing to push their concepts and their characters to the brink. The best examples of this willingness to go beyond come from two of the Young Turks in the anthology, Barron and Ballingrud, both of whom are known exclusively for their short fiction.

"The Forest" by Barron proves just how important texture and tone are to great horror fiction. His account of a strange reunion between famous filmmaker Richard Jefferson Partridge and, among others, those who accompanied him on the harrowing trip that gained him his reputation simply wouldn't work without a commitment to atmosphere. A pale overhead lamp "hummed like a wasp in a jar." The sun "transformed the landscape into a mass of illuminated rust and glass." As Partridge comes closer and closer to the horrific truth behind the reunion, it is Barron's devotion to very specific details about our world that makes the rather spectacular "supernatural" element work so well.

Writers at the top of their form

Conversely, Ballingrud in "The Monsters of Heaven" uses a stripped-down style that allows the reader to relax and accept the presence of damaged angel-like creatures in a story that is, at its core, about a man's terrible mistake with regard to his child, and the effects of that mistake on his relationship with his wife. Sentences like "He stared at the landscape of her naked back, pale in the streetlight leaking through the blinds, feeling furious and ruined" convey emotion, atmosphere and a certain ethereal quality that is flexible enough to encompass the real and the unreal. Both Barron and Ballingrud also understand that a sense of both horror and closure has more to do with their characters than a speculative element. To that end, neither writer bothers to really explain the supernatural parts of his stories, and in refusing to do so they trust the reader to provide that explanation, further enhancing the suspension of disbelief.

Another standout from Inferno comes from the veteran writer Lucius Shepard. His "The Ease With Which We Freed the Beast" displays his mastery with a stunning evocation of characters on the edge of a literal abyss. The story effortlessly conveys the relationship between the narrator and his girlfriend while also including such first-rate ominous description as "By unfocusing my eyes, I could make it into a soldier's remains, a giant fallen during an assault, his body collapsed to rib bones, tenting up the brown-and-black camouflage of the boards." The actual appearance of a beast is terrifying, the ending of the story fittingly low-key and ambiguous.

When the anthology seems merely ordinary, it's often because of a story that doesn't take as many chances. For example, Stephen Gallagher's creepy ghost story "The Uninvited" might be a stand-out in another context, but here it comes across as slight—likewise "Inelastic Collisions" by the usually reliable Elizabeth Bear. However, the majority of the remaining stories in Inferno are excellent, especially Conrad Williams' "Perhaps the Last," Mike O'Driscoll's "13 O'Clock," K.W. Jeter's "Riding Bitch," P.D. Cacek's "The Keeper" and "Ghorla" by Mark Samuels. Jeffrey Ford's exceedingly odd "The Bedroom Light" will divide readers between those who enjoy it and those who say to themselves "Huh?", but it's still worth perusing.

In reading Inferno, I was reminded at times of the old Whispers series I used to love, as well as such iconic stand-alone horror anthologies such as Prime Evil and Dark Forces. Time will tell whether Inferno is as good as those books, but for me it provided several fun hours of atmospheric, intelligent, scary, entertaining reading. Here's hoping Ellen Datlow can be persuaded to edit an Inferno 2 in the near future.