or no easily explicated reason, horror fiction seems healthiest (if that adjective can be used) in the English speaking world, with the greatest number of writers active in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States. Representing each of those nations respectively, veterans Ramsey Campbell, Jack Dann and Dennis Etchison here present a massive anthology showcasing the latest work of their demented countrymen.
"The Hanged Man of Oz" by Steve Nagy presents the hoary urban legend of a suicide visible in the release print of the venerable Judy Garland musical, and uses it to tell a tale of obsession and the fantastic. "The Bone Ship" by Terry Dowling is the story of a collector whose search for the artifact of the title leads him to a bad end. "Blake's Angel" by Janeen Webb cautions against caging things that should not be caged. "The Obedient Child" by George Clayton Johnson is the tale of a predator who comes after the tot of the title, only to find that she's dangerous prey indeed.
"The Lords of Zero" by Tony Richards presents a financially strapped protagonist who moves into a poverty-stricken neighborhood and has an unsettling encounter with a street gang. "The Big Green Grin" by Gahan Wilson is a fable about the intersection between sibling love and sibling rivalry, played out against a very odd feature of the local landscape. "Both And" by Gary Fry is a dark psychological tale about the banality of evil, and the moment when it comes to recognize itself. "Love Is A Stone" by Simon Brown takes an age-old metaphor about unfeeling men, and with a little magical intervention, makes it literal.
"The Right Men" by Michael Marshall Smith tells the tale of a man dominated by his rapacious, incredibly evil employer, who believes he'll finally be free on the day of the evil old man's suicide: as you might suppose, no such luck. "Out Late In The Park" by Steve Rasnic Tem is a dark contemplation of old age. "Mr. Sly Stops For a Cup of Joe" by Scott Emerson Bull presents another human embodiment of evil, who passes a few entertaining moments toying with a lesser monster like a cat would toy with a mouse. "Jennifer's Turn" by Fruma Klass is a nasty speculation on how the future deals with a population of aging baby Boomers.
There are 33 stories in all, including prominent contributions by Ray Bradbury, Peter Crowther, Lisa Tuttle and Melanie Tem.
A massive compendium of Things Not To Do
Horror anthologies can be hard to take in one unbroken read, even for folks who love the genre: the problem being that too many of the field's short stories proceed according to certain traditional beats, usually ending in some last-page variation of, "And then something really, really awful happens to the bastard." Gathering the Bones is not entirely immune from that ailment; indeed, it's displayed by some of the best writers here, including the usually reliable Thomas Tessier, who in "Moments of Change" presents a protagonist whose curiosity, predictably, treats him about as well as it treated the cat. Readers can counter deja vu by dipping into the book at odd intervals, instead of at a single sitting. But the best of its contents are fine indeed. Among the highlights:
"Li'l Miss Ultrasound" by Robert Devereaux, the best story in the book, furthers that writer's reputation for going where less timid souls would never venture. A takeoff on the popular pre-school beauty contests that account for the celebrity of the doomed child model Jon-Benet Ramsey, it posits a future where mothers make careers of entering their fetuses into competition. Computer-imaging dresses the unborn in increasingly provocative garb, the children once born are all but ignored, and the prize goes to the embryo whose random motions look most like a pose on the cover of Vogue. As uncomfortable as fiction gets, it's dark as satire gets, it wrings
a thousand separate variations on its nasty one-joke premise, and emerges a queasy but unqualified
winner.
The runner-up, "The Intervention" by Kim Newman, a devastatingly paranoid takeoff on 12-Step Programs, presents a hapless protagonist whose seemingly perfect life is shattered when friends and family and co-workers yank him away from his daily routine and have him committed to an Institution where, we're given to understand, he's doomed to stay until he admits he has a problem. Alcoholics and drug addicts go through this all the time, but this man is neither: indeed, his biggest problem is figuring out just what he's supposed to be confessing to. The absurd awfulness of his baffling situation, and the constant self-righteous assurances on the part of everybody around him that all this abuse is for his own good, make for a story as perversely funny as it is horrific.
Other highlights: "Coming of Age" by Joel Lane is the powerful study of immigrant Rajan, whose son Ashok goes missing without explanation. The story's heart lies in the weight of the young man's absence bears on the grieving father, and that man's desperate hunger for an explanation, even if that explanation turns out to be horrible. In such a state, the story argues, determining the worst is better than not knowing at all. "Picking Up Courteney" by Tim Waggoner builds its dread around another vision of a threat to a beloved child. "Sounds Like" by Mike O'Driscoll is a relentless study of madness in the form of sound aversion: It's a dense tale of creeping
disaffection that gathers steam as it goes along. Just as you think it's gone as far as it's
going to go, it goes further. It's stunning. "Under the Bright and Hollow Sky" by Andrew J.
Wilson posits the existence of a great lost horror author named Cranston Alderton who may have
been in touch with terrors that rivalled Lovecraft's; a biographer seeking the facts of his life
continues the pursuit despite being repeatedly warned off, and nobody will be surprised to find that he comes to a bad end, too, but it is fun, in a fannish sort of way, to note the handful of real-life genre figures he gets to reference along the way.
Graham Joyce's "Tiger Moth," which closes the volume, is like one of the more benign Twilight Zone episodes in that the protagonist's magical experiences provide him with nothing but the moxie to change his life for the better. Odd as it may be to end a horror anthology with the story of something good happening to somebody, the experience is refreshing after all the awfulness that precedes it.
