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darkling_talesWell, after months of fruitless offline searching I finally got my hands on a copy of The Mammoth Book Of Best New Horror 19 at my local Waterstone’s (the Sheffield branch being surprisingly well stocked with that sort of thing.) It came out last Autumn, so my thoughts on the book are probably even more worthless than usual, but never mind.
The 19th book in Stephen Jones’ well-known series is quite a cracker, as it turns out. It contains several very scary stories. ‘Still Water’ by Joel Lane is told through the eyes of a young police officer and involves a strange young jewel thief driven mad by a certain ‘She’ that emerges from the wall of a decrepit house, and it’s my favourite of all his stories I’ve read so far, though I had read it in a different anthology not too long before. Joel Knight’s ‘Calico Black, Calico Blue’ is an impressive if somewhat predictable yarn on the well-worn theme of scary doll collections (I can never read too many stories about scary dolls, I’m terrified of the things!) which ends on a distinctly Aickmanesque note. In fact, many of the British stories in this collection owe a debt to Robert Aickman - Simon Kurt Unsworth’s ‘The Church on The Island’, for example, or ‘The Other Village’by Simon Strantzas. I’m not sure what has caused this sudden surge of authorly enthusiasm for Aickman, but as a massive fan myself I really can’t complain!
In fact, the British/American divide seems especially pronounced in this year’s crop of talent. The American authors (Joe Landsdale, Joe Hill, Tom Piccirilli, the usual) seem content to plough their usual furrows, dishing out hideous descriptions of torture and, at the other end of the spectrum, mood pieces about sulking men with no real story attached to them (Steven Erikson’s ‘This Rich Evil Sound’ being really quite irritating.) The British fare tends to differ more widely in tone and theme, though an unusual amount of stories in this collection are set in and around the sea (not all of them equally good, sadly.) Necronomiphiles should proceed straight to Mark Samuel’s ‘A Gentleman From Mexico’, a story about the reincarnation of the old Cthulhu-botherer himself. I’m not a great fan of Lovecraft and I generally find it intensely annoying when authors insert real famous people into their stories, but this story handles that situation in a very unconventional way, and the usual Samuels style makes it an enjoyable read.
Many readers will consider Reggie Oliver’s story, ‘The Children Of Monte Rosa’, to be the jewel in the crown of this anthology, if only because it’s so damned hard to find copies of his previous books (and even if you found one, you wouldn’t get much change from £200 quid, if what I hear is true!) I must confess that reading ‘The Children....’ has seriously whetted my appetite for more of Oliver’s ghostly tales. It is quite simply brilliant in every way, and totally original too. Put it like this, you wouldn’t want your kids to play in that particular garden, beautiful though it is...Oliver’s effort achieved something no story has done for at least 15 years: it made me so scared I had to sleep with the light on the night I read it, and days later I still find the memory of the horrors therein twisting uncomfortably inside me. I think it’s worth buying the collection for this story alone.
Although this collection is unusually rich in talent, there are still some duds. Christopher Harman’s ‘Behind The Clouds: In Front Of The Sun’ is especially frustrating, because it positively hums with missed opportunities. Harman claims that the story began as a Jamesian ‘homage’ (to Mr Humphrey's Inheritance, to be specific) , with a young man gaining possession of a highly sinister old globe, but then ran off the rails and developed into something ‘more interesting’. Sadly, I found the story’s slow, agonizing slide from a good old compact ghost story into a sprawling, predictable and hackneyed End of The World scenario far from interesting. Christopher Fowler is below par this year, and I kind of wish Jones would stop automatically anthologizing Ramsey Campbell’s stories, because the author hasn’t really trod any new ground in over a decade. I was initially pleased to see that for once Jones had refrained from including a David J Schow story – Schow and Kim Newman are almost without fail the two worst authors in any given book in this series, and yet they’ve had a safe billet here for years. Then I saw what Jones had replaced David J Schow with: Neil Gaiman and his reliably shit comic story ‘The Witches’ Headstone’. Several of my Goth friends have stated that they love Gaiman so much they’ll beat anyone who doesn’t like him to a bloody pulp. I think I could happily take a fair few beatings if it would just make Gaiman stop existing. And the Newman story is boring, naturally. Gary McMahon’s tale ‘Pumpkin Night’ is daft, Tales From The Crypt level stuff that actually takes itself seriously, but he is a relatively new author in the field I think, so I’m inclined to hang fire in his case until I’ve read more.But don’t let all this mithering put you off!
All in all, Number 19 is a shining example of what can be achieved when an editor who cares about the genre is able to pool talents old and new from both sides of the Atlantic. If you don't have this book you should probably get it ASAP - or at least before the next collection comes out in Autumn!
The 19th book in Stephen Jones’ well-known series is quite a cracker, as it turns out. It contains several very scary stories. ‘Still Water’ by Joel Lane is told through the eyes of a young police officer and involves a strange young jewel thief driven mad by a certain ‘She’ that emerges from the wall of a decrepit house, and it’s my favourite of all his stories I’ve read so far, though I had read it in a different anthology not too long before. Joel Knight’s ‘Calico Black, Calico Blue’ is an impressive if somewhat predictable yarn on the well-worn theme of scary doll collections (I can never read too many stories about scary dolls, I’m terrified of the things!) which ends on a distinctly Aickmanesque note. In fact, many of the British stories in this collection owe a debt to Robert Aickman - Simon Kurt Unsworth’s ‘The Church on The Island’, for example, or ‘The Other Village’by Simon Strantzas. I’m not sure what has caused this sudden surge of authorly enthusiasm for Aickman, but as a massive fan myself I really can’t complain!
In fact, the British/American divide seems especially pronounced in this year’s crop of talent. The American authors (Joe Landsdale, Joe Hill, Tom Piccirilli, the usual) seem content to plough their usual furrows, dishing out hideous descriptions of torture and, at the other end of the spectrum, mood pieces about sulking men with no real story attached to them (Steven Erikson’s ‘This Rich Evil Sound’ being really quite irritating.) The British fare tends to differ more widely in tone and theme, though an unusual amount of stories in this collection are set in and around the sea (not all of them equally good, sadly.) Necronomiphiles should proceed straight to Mark Samuel’s ‘A Gentleman From Mexico’, a story about the reincarnation of the old Cthulhu-botherer himself. I’m not a great fan of Lovecraft and I generally find it intensely annoying when authors insert real famous people into their stories, but this story handles that situation in a very unconventional way, and the usual Samuels style makes it an enjoyable read.
Many readers will consider Reggie Oliver’s story, ‘The Children Of Monte Rosa’, to be the jewel in the crown of this anthology, if only because it’s so damned hard to find copies of his previous books (and even if you found one, you wouldn’t get much change from £200 quid, if what I hear is true!) I must confess that reading ‘The Children....’ has seriously whetted my appetite for more of Oliver’s ghostly tales. It is quite simply brilliant in every way, and totally original too. Put it like this, you wouldn’t want your kids to play in that particular garden, beautiful though it is...Oliver’s effort achieved something no story has done for at least 15 years: it made me so scared I had to sleep with the light on the night I read it, and days later I still find the memory of the horrors therein twisting uncomfortably inside me. I think it’s worth buying the collection for this story alone.
Although this collection is unusually rich in talent, there are still some duds. Christopher Harman’s ‘Behind The Clouds: In Front Of The Sun’ is especially frustrating, because it positively hums with missed opportunities. Harman claims that the story began as a Jamesian ‘homage’ (to Mr Humphrey's Inheritance, to be specific) , with a young man gaining possession of a highly sinister old globe, but then ran off the rails and developed into something ‘more interesting’. Sadly, I found the story’s slow, agonizing slide from a good old compact ghost story into a sprawling, predictable and hackneyed End of The World scenario far from interesting. Christopher Fowler is below par this year, and I kind of wish Jones would stop automatically anthologizing Ramsey Campbell’s stories, because the author hasn’t really trod any new ground in over a decade. I was initially pleased to see that for once Jones had refrained from including a David J Schow story – Schow and Kim Newman are almost without fail the two worst authors in any given book in this series, and yet they’ve had a safe billet here for years. Then I saw what Jones had replaced David J Schow with: Neil Gaiman and his reliably shit comic story ‘The Witches’ Headstone’. Several of my Goth friends have stated that they love Gaiman so much they’ll beat anyone who doesn’t like him to a bloody pulp. I think I could happily take a fair few beatings if it would just make Gaiman stop existing. And the Newman story is boring, naturally. Gary McMahon’s tale ‘Pumpkin Night’ is daft, Tales From The Crypt level stuff that actually takes itself seriously, but he is a relatively new author in the field I think, so I’m inclined to hang fire in his case until I’ve read more.But don’t let all this mithering put you off!
All in all, Number 19 is a shining example of what can be achieved when an editor who cares about the genre is able to pool talents old and new from both sides of the Atlantic. If you don't have this book you should probably get it ASAP - or at least before the next collection comes out in Autumn!
