The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies

Edited by D F Lewis

Megazanthus Press

2011

ISBN: 978-1-4477-5735-1

324 pages

£10

Available from Amazon

Reviewed by Nick Jackson

This review is hugely biased. After all, I have a story in this collection myself, so I’m hardly likely to rubbish any of my fellow writers.  I’ve avoided comparative judgements in the interests of assessing it as a collective effort rather than a competition of egos.  This anthology of anthologies encouraged quite an indulgence of literary themes and perhaps might have ended up as the worst kind of exercise in authorial navel-gazing but somehow, with the kind of quirky twitch of the tail that characterises any DF Lewis enterprise, it has escaped that worst of fates.  Reading this book is a bit like looking into one of those kaleidoscopes in which, with the effect of light and a few bits of mirror, the plastic pieces turn into minutely varied patterns.  So, the elements of anthology and horror are interpreted with each writer’s idiosyncrasies to create a kind of Borgesian nightmare – libraries within libraries, books within books.

There are common themes and references in all of the stories, above and beyond the obvious, giving rise to my conviction that all of the writers here are recording a common cultural phenomenon: a disintegration of meaning and a deep fear of what lies beyond.  I was reminded, at some point, of the opening of Sartre’s “Nausea” in which the narrator begins to experience a visceral horror of the concrete object.  The characters in the stories often touch the real world and recoil – preferring the insubstantial world of ideas to the horror of the mundane.

In “It’s Only Words”, the fine first piece in the anthology, the protagonist uses fragments of texts to cocoon his victims, thereby relieving the thunderous discourse of the inner voices that poison his existence but, as people around him begin to lose their ability to communicate, he fears he has become the agent of this linguistic decay and the final impression is of a world spiralling into chaos.  “You Walk the Pages” by Mark Valentine deals with a similarly autistic-seeming individual who uses horror stories as a way of getting back at people who offend him, like the lady in the chip shop, by substituting their names for the characters in the stories and making them suffer the same fate, or worse.  It is the hilariously deadpan first person narrator that made the story work so well.  “The Rediscovery of Death” by Mike O’Driscoll, features a struggling small press publisher in search of a winning title to keep the publishing wheels turning and a shadowy character offering some kind of Faustian bargain.  A down-to-earth girlfriend provides the rational viewpoint.  The horror anthology becomes, for the publisher, a horrific anthology.  This is a story about literary obsession and also, crucially, about the disintegration of meaning.

Other stories are themselves fragmented like Chinese puzzles in which the reader has to piece together the meaning from sparse clues.  S.D. Tullis’s “Horror Planet” consists of a deconstructed narrative that flits between scraps of seemingly random thought, depicting, in a few short pages, a kind of planetary collapse.  I loved the frantic pace of this story.  “The Useless”  is Dominy Clements’ totally unconventional contribution to this anthology.  It’s brutally short and it succeeds, with charming simplicity, in confusing the hell out of you whilst leaving you on the lingering verge of understanding.

“Flowers of the Sea” by Reggie Oliver follows the physical and mental decay of an artist, as told by her husband, whose slowly dawning consciousness of the process of the disease has a haunting emotional depth.  The narrator’s realisation of his own mortality is rendered with great skill.  The story seems to draw out the themes of the collection’s other narratives, to focus their sometimes only half-expressed ideas, with a disturbing clarity.

In Joel Lane’s “Midnight Flight” an elderly man, in the grip of dementia, seems only half aware that he is out of kilter with the modern world but forms a fierce determination to track down a half-remembered book of horror stories from his childhood.  As he searches, his childhood memories surge up to obliterate the present.  The quest for the book becomes a quest for the book’s author and ultimately for the remaining shreds of his own identity.  The story gives us an exquisitely detailed description of the process of amnesia and the stories, the memories of stories, that we cling to when we are out of touch with all else in this fast-disintegrating world.

In “Tears of the Mutant Jester”, the books themselves become sick, vomiting indigestible words and having to be relieved of their unnecessary appendices.  Rhys Hughes’ brightly punning narrative transforms the darker subtext of horror like a breath of fresh air.  Where other authors see an opportunity for expressing angst, Hughes seizes the chance to make us laugh at this literary conceit – books have feelings too!

Thornton Excelsior, Rhys Hughes’, character understands the power of books and the words they contain as much as any of this collection’s authors.  We spend so much time in the company of printed words that we know their power: their ability to create or destroy, to provoke wars and reduce men to quivering wrecks, to inspire love and devotion and to raise our eyes to beauty.  Books are the driving force of many of the characters’ lives.  In D.P. Watt’s story, “All Your Worldly Goods”, we are introduced to the deceptively cosy world of a charity shop volunteer.  His carefully regulated life is gradually undermined when a mysterious man brings a fateful book into the shop.  The very ordinariness of the man’s life, its petty jealousies and creeping sense of worthlessness creates a profoundly moving setting.

In several of the stories, the process of writing itself is evoked in all its arduousness – the anxiety, the growing sense of purposelessness and the sheer bloody-minded determination to define the indefinable, half aware that, in the very act of creating, the author destroys the very thing he is trying to perfect, the beauty of the idea submitted to the harsh and sometimes ugly reality of ink and paper.  Oh the horror!   “The Writer” by Clayton Steelback draws on this creative struggle.  The story gradually assumes an uncomfortable presence in the writer’s life, becoming ever more concrete until an evil character breaks through into real life.  The horror of nightmares becoming flesh crops up in several of the stories.  As authors perhaps we are more than usually susceptible to this illusion or delusion, perhaps because we are always striving to model characters from real life.  I’m surely not the only author to feel confused as to whether a memory of an incident is from real-life or one I imagined for some self-created literary world.  Perhaps it’s the first sign of madness.   Rosanne Rabinowitz’s finely detailed study of a woman’s search for a book she once picked up in the school library acknowledges the power of books as totems, somehow focusing a person’s entire worldview.  The story within this story develops the idea of feelings or ideas transforming people’s lives –either for the better – a pearl, or for the worse – a boil.  The story’s psychological depth allows the reader to appreciate the symbolic power of the book.   A girl and boy encountered in a field of flowers, provides a sort of Arcadian vision for the story’s protagonist, towards which she strives.  Flowers and plants are symbols of love but, later, in a different story within the story, another plant engulfs and digests the girl who tends it.

In other stories plants poison or become symbols of annihilation as in “Flowers of the Sea”.  In “The Writer”, a vase is transformed into a multi-stemmed plant that scatters its spores and invokes a state of madness.  “Tree Ring Anthology” by Daniel Ausema subverts the tree’s image as a thing of beauty, usefulness, permanence and shelter.   The story cleverly uses the concentric pattern of the tree’s rings to document the aftermath of an environmental catastrophe.  Subverting symbols of innocence, transforming them into objects of corruption and decay is a common technique used by writers of horror, but Ausema’s story is perfectly original in its execution.

Werner Herzog said that the thing to be avoided at all costs, in cinematic terms,  is the clichéd image, as presented through the lens of any Hollywood movie.   The stories in this anthology avoid the clichés of horror, either by creating fresh sources of disturbance or by getting inside the horror image to dissect its psychological power.  In “Common Myths and Misconceptions Regarding Rita Kendall”, A.J. Kirby exposes the world of an aging horror starlet whose famous scream is subjected to analysis by a bored magazine writer who thereby uncovers the star’s secret source of guilt.  As Rita Kendall’s shadowy doppelganger is slowly and clumsily sleuthed out by the hack we slowly witness the pain behind the melodrama and the emptiness of the celebrity life that conceals it.

“The American Club” also features a doppelganger, of sorts.  The narrator delves into the enigma of his dying father’s writing but uncovers an unpalatable explanation for his father’s refusal to publish his work.  This is an intense study of the subconscious.  A ruined building with its decaying staircases and abandoned cellars acts as a metaphor for the writer’s twisted imagination and reflects an over-arching theme of this collection – the horror of the literary imagination.  As writers in search of horror we become subjects of our own literary endeavours.  What could be worse?  The author, Christopher Morris, is astute enough to leave the ending insubstantial, to give the reader the merest hint of the dark truth.

By contrast, Rachel Kendall’s “Horror Stories For Boys” shows no restraint in revealing the brutality of an abusive father and the traumatic effects of his up-bringing on the son who returns to his childhood home to remember, with the aid of a book of horror stories, and rekindle his hatred of his father.  But it’s the final scene, as he visits his dying father in hospital which carries the full sting of this powerful narrative.  This is a story full of light and darkness and a terrifying realism.

A gentler pace is set in Tony Lovell’s “The Follower”.  This story works, like Rosanne Rabinowitz’s, more as a study of the totemic power of books, than as a straight ‘horror’ story.  Yet, there is definitely something unsettling in the idea of books, especially those read in childhood, which influence our lives, almost as if they had been the blueprint for the way we react to others, shaping our actions and  defining our prejudices.  The story consists of little more than episodes from a woman’s life – as a young girl, a mother and later as a dementing old woman.  Apparently minor details acquire a mesmerising significance as her life concertinas itself, folds in with the precision of origami, so as to make her life seem very short indeed.  Perhaps this is Lovell’s horror; I was unsure, but entranced nevertheless.

Another story, equally chilling in its ability to reveal the power of stories to corrupt our lives, is Colin Insole’s “The Apoplexy of Beelzebub”.  Insole has created a city somewhere between a fantasy city and a city in Britain’s North East, Hull comes to mind, in which a daughter strives to get away from her wicked (step?) mother and the poisonous web of libel and gossip which festers in the city archives.  Is the daughter in control of her destiny of not?  Will she escape the web of words?

“Residua” is ostensibly a story about a prisoner who is, by all accounts, innocent of the crime of which he’s accused.   The characters and setting evoke the prisoner’s world, but it’s the story’s growing sense of unease that goes beyond the setting and presents the reader with a disturbingly surreal conclusion.  With its flashbacks and character transpositions, this should have been a confusing piece but it is anchored by a strong pair of central characters and worked beautifully.

“The Fifth Corner” by E. Michael Lewis is a well-written story that might have made its way into any collection of horror fiction.  It’s the story which stands out for me as being less concerned with the world of literature and ideas and more with the standard tropes of the horror genre:  a struggle against a manifestation of evil.  It kept me on the edge of my seat and turning the pages but I was aware, even as I admired its technical skill, of the extent to which its central “horror image” was familiar to me from films and stories within the genre.  The protagonist, unlike many of the other characters in this collection, seems to emerge unchanged by his experience.   It serves as a reminder of what it is about “horror” that the small press and particularly the slipstream is so good at subverting.

As horror collections go, this anthology is more existentially unsettling than comfortably frightening.  There are very few references to evil and more of an exploration of the psychology of fear: our fear of disease, corruption and death.  There are plagues of words that express nothing and stories within stories that go nowhere.  The authors in this collection seem to understand that true horror is that which is not explicit or definite or resolved.  They may use gods or myths (their own created mythologies) to evoke a sense of horror or reveal lives of astounding banality, echoing our own.   They lead us to the abyss and force us to look down, but it seems we are looking inwards at ourselves and there we encounter the worst horror of all.

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