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cozylittlebrownhouse's review against another edition
2.0
What a disappointment.
I couldn't even read all of the stories, so many of them were THAT bad. This is not a horror anthology, or anything close to the horror genre. I know Straub had labeled it the "new" horror, but only a few of the many could be classified as anything close. Bummer, because I was looking for a gripping read. I liked a couple of stories, which is why I gave it two stars instead of one.
I couldn't even read all of the stories, so many of them were THAT bad. This is not a horror anthology, or anything close to the horror genre. I know Straub had labeled it the "new" horror, but only a few of the many could be classified as anything close. Bummer, because I was looking for a gripping read. I liked a couple of stories, which is why I gave it two stars instead of one.
scottyb's review against another edition
4.0
Really, really good. Obviously this is a short story anthology collecting works from different authors so you're going to love some, hate some, and be really confused by some; but, overall, I'd say that this was a very decent read and the stories I loved made up for those I didn't and for those that made me wonder what the heck the author was thinking when they wrote it. Before I go into which stories I like the best, I will have to say that I was really surprised many of them were collected in a 'horror' anthology; many of them read like plain old fiction with a slight fantastical and/or supernatural twist.
I'd say my favourites were Dan Chaon's "The Bees", the Tems' "The Man on the Ceiling", Kelly Link's "Louise's Ghost", Jonathan Carroll's "The Sadness of Detail", Glen Hirshberg's "The Two Sams", Benjamin Percy's "Unearthed", Stephen King's "Flexible Bullet", Joe Hill's "20th Century Ghost", Graham Joyce's "Black Dust", and Neil Gaiman's "October in the Chair". There were only about 3 stories I'd never go back and read again, otherwise all (even the ones I didn't list as favourites) were very well done and deserve a re-read down the road. I'm definitely going to look into the authors' other works.
I'd say my favourites were Dan Chaon's "The Bees", the Tems' "The Man on the Ceiling", Kelly Link's "Louise's Ghost", Jonathan Carroll's "The Sadness of Detail", Glen Hirshberg's "The Two Sams", Benjamin Percy's "Unearthed", Stephen King's "Flexible Bullet", Joe Hill's "20th Century Ghost", Graham Joyce's "Black Dust", and Neil Gaiman's "October in the Chair". There were only about 3 stories I'd never go back and read again, otherwise all (even the ones I didn't list as favourites) were very well done and deserve a re-read down the road. I'm definitely going to look into the authors' other works.
linzeelee1023's review against another edition
1.0
Literally the most boring book I've read in years. I only liked a few of the stories and am really upset about all if the time I wasted with this book.
megapolisomancy's review against another edition
2.0
In which Peter Straub sets out to broaden the umbrella of “horror” beyond the stereotypical blood-and-guts sensationalism typically associated with it. He succeeds at this so well that I had a hard time figuring out exactly what made some of these stories fit into the genre at all.
Dan Chaon - “The Bees” - A husband and father is haunted (literally or metaphorically?) by the first wife and child he abandoned during his drinking days. Impressively dark and downtrodden, although one wishes the two wives were sketched out a bit more actively. 3.5/5
Elizabeth Hand - “Cleopatra Brimstone” - The second time I’ve realized after starting a story that I had read it before in Redshift and promptly forgotten about it. This story follows a beautiful young entomologist who travels to England after surviving a sexual assault, at which point she proceeds to pick men up at bars and clubs and turn them into butterflies by having sex with them. I guess there’s something to be said here about a woman reasserting her sexual agency, but weird stories about transgressive sexuality are just not my thing. Also Hand devotes huge chunks of time to talking about raves and clubs. 1/5
Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem - “The Man on the Ceiling” - I enjoyed the conceit of this one - Melanie and Steve, a married couple, take turns metafictionally (?) relaying the effect that Melanie’s lifelong terror/hallucination of a ghostly presence has on their life together, but the story kind of fizzles out without doing much of anything with that conceit. 3/5
M. John Harrison - “The Great God Pan” - Decades ago, three college friends took part in some sort of magic ritual which has proceeded to ruin the rest of their lives, despite the fact that none of them can remember what actually happened that night. Like “The Bees,” this is a very dark story, and the reader is also swept into this sort of claustrophobic hopelessness where the characters find themselves as they suffer the consequences of this action that remains entirely obscured throughout. Harrison later expanded this story into the novel The Course of the Heart, which I wouldn’t mind reading. 4.5/5
Ramsey Campbell - “The Voice of the Beach” - My favorite story in here, and also the one most comfortably situated within the weird/horror tradition - highly reminiscent of “The Willows” and itself echoed later in China Mieville’s “Details.” A reclusive man living on the beach has a friend, recently recovered from a nervous breakdown, come and stay with him. They notice odd patterns and details about the beach, find an abandoned village (complete with a seemingly-incoherent fragmentary diary), the friend (and the narrator!) act increasingly oddly, and things unravel quite nicely. 5/5
Brian Evenson - “Body” - Having enjoyed what I’ve read of Evenson’s in the past, this was a big disappointment. A fragmentary and disjointed account of a man imprisoned and tortured by some monks, and then something about women and tearing shoes apart and... ? 1/5
Kelly Link - “Louise’s Ghost” - A story about two lifelong friends, who are both named Louise, no last names given, so the reader is left to differentiate whom is being discussed by their quirky actions. I would expect to hate this, and it did wear awfully thin, but by the end I couldn’t help enjoying this story a good deal nonetheless. One Louise has a daughter, while the other has a ghost. Things get sad. 3/5
Jonathan Carroll - “The Sadness of Detail” - An interesting setup - an angel recruits an artist to recreate images for an increasingly senile God - that ends right after revealing said setup. 2/5
M. Rickert - “Leda” - A modern retelling of the Greek myth of Leda and the swan, no more, no less. 2/5
Thomas Tessier - “In Praise of Folly” - An appreciator of architectural follies travels to a remote town in New York in order to photograph a garden done up generations ago as a mini-Italy by an eccentric industrialist. Up until the climax, nothing seems amiss (aside from a single reference when he arrives in the town), and this means the horrific element (which is well-done, such as it is), is entirely divorced from the narrative leading up to it (also well-done, such as it was). This was probably the author’s intent, but there could have at least been more of a thematic connection. 3/5
David J. Schow “Plot Twist” - Utter garbage. Three “friends” (a couple and a third wheel, although none of them like one another at all, probably because they are all horribly obnoxious assholes) are stranded in an impossibly-endless desert after their car breaks down on their way to Vegas, after which they spend their time marching and sniping at one another using strings of words that I am not going to dignify by calling “jokes.” The misogyny, which has been growing increasingly bothersome throughout the story, explodes into the foreground at the end. This is, ironically enough, a perfect example of the sort of gleefully gory and sophomorically “edgy” bullshit that this book is supposed to be counteracting. 0/5
Glen Hirshberg “The Two Sams” - As interesting and non-problematic as the story of a man haunted by his two miscarried children could possibly be, I guess. 2/5
Thomas Ligotti “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story” Starts off as a bit of metafictional, humorous “advice” on the different ways to approach writing this kind of story (using the example of man brought to a poor end by a haunted pair of pants). I enjoyed that part, but not so much the following part where the pseudonymous writer ends up haunting his counterpart or whatever it was that ended up happening. It lost my interest, clearly. 2/5
Benjamin Percy “Unearthed” - An unambiguously non-supernatural story about an archaeologist who deals with the loss of his wife by taking an unhealthy interest in excavating (robbing) Native American burial sites. Told from the point of view of his son, this was well-written and kind of compelling in its examination of the different directions their grief took, but... not horrific in any sense? 3/5
Bradford Morrow "Gardener of Heart” - A standard “shocking twist” ghost story written in some impressively overwrought prose. I’ll have to go back to the book to get some choice quotes to include here. ⅖
Peter Straub “Little Red’s Tango” - Another odd inclusion, this is a hagiography of Little Red, an eccentric with a magical collection of jazz records. Teasing out all of the references in that regard was a lot of fun, and this was a well-written story with some interesting variations in form, but aside from a very brief interlude with a vampire (?), not horrific at all. 4.5/5
Stephen King “The Ballad of a Flexible Bullet” - I have yet to read anything by King that I found particularly enjoyable or impressive. A washed-up editor relates to a small party the interminable story of his downfall: when he (a drunk) and a reclusive genius author (a madman) convinced one another that they had magical typewriter elves. 1/5
Joe Hill “20th Century Ghost” - A movie theatre is haunted, rather banally, by the ghost of a teenager who died while watching the Wizard of Oz. Better than his dad’s story, but not by much. 2/5
Ellen Klages “The Green Glass Sea” - An adopted child living at the Los Alamos facility during the Manhattan Project visits the aftermath of the first nuclear bomb test with her family, where they pick up newly-fused pieces of glass. Aside from the rather remote horror of knowing that they are exposing themselves to radiation, this is just a rather straightforward YA story that later became the last chapter of a YA historical fiction novel. Why is this here? 2/5
Tia V. Travis “The Kiss” - I’ve mostly avoided spoilers here but I’m throwing that to the wind with this one. Our protagonist is a grown woman visiting the grave of her mother, who was the active part of a murder/suicide with the protagonist’s father when the protagonist was a young girl. The father was a jazz drummer, and the mother was a starlet/exotic dancer, and we are reminded again and again of how beautiful and alluring the mother was, with or without clothes. To add to the melodrama, the mother was the woman on the side - literally, as she and the daughter lived next door to the father and his icy harridan of a wife. Said harridan refuses to grant the father a divorce despite his pleadings, and the community figures this is what eventually drove the mother to end both their lives. The daughter stumbles in moments after the fact and finds her father already dead and her mother giving up the ghost while kissing his wedding ring.
The twist here is that decades later the daughter, having been raised by the widow to hate her “whore” of a mother, opens her mother’s grave, sees the wedding ring lodged in the skeleton’s throat, surmises that the engraved ring was swallowed in order to provide a clue that the crime was not in fact a murder/suicide but in fact a murder/murder perpetrated by the widow, and then... goes and kisses the ring into the widow’s mouth, fatally choking her. 1/5
Graham Joyce - “Black Dust” - An effectively downtrodden story about poverty and family life in a Welsh mining town. The child protagonist has a relatively happy family life, while his best friend has an abusive father, but the story does an excellent job of portraying him as a human being rather than a one-dimensional villain. The supernatural element of this story is slight, but it packs a punch. 5/5
Neil Gaiman - “October in the Chair” - Has a weird framing story where the months take turns telling each other stories, and I remember thinking that was a stupid disservice to the tale at the heart of this entry (told by October), only now I find that I cannot for the life of me remember what October’s story even was. Having reminded myself, I can say that it was actually the surprisingly fine story of a boy who runs away from home and makes friends with a ghost. 3.5/5
John Crowley - “Missolonghi 1824” - Loyd Byron recounts the story of the time he saved a satyr from an angry mob. Neither horrific nor compelling. 1/5
Rosalind Palermo Stevenson “Insect Dreams” - Another story about an expatriate entomologist, oddly enough - this time the real life Maria Sibylla Merian, a Dutch naturalist who went to the colony of Surinam in 1699 to study insects. She is recounting the story through the haze of malaria, which means it’s all rather fragmentary and verges on stream-of-consciousness at times, and is written in the present tense throughout. The horror manifests itself in the racism of the colonists, which climaxes in another rape scene, which, while at least not being fetishized, is rendered instead in such over-the-top violence that it becomes surreal. Enough already. 2/5
Dan Chaon - “The Bees” - A husband and father is haunted (literally or metaphorically?) by the first wife and child he abandoned during his drinking days. Impressively dark and downtrodden, although one wishes the two wives were sketched out a bit more actively. 3.5/5
Elizabeth Hand - “Cleopatra Brimstone” - The second time I’ve realized after starting a story that I had read it before in Redshift and promptly forgotten about it. This story follows a beautiful young entomologist who travels to England after surviving a sexual assault, at which point she proceeds to pick men up at bars and clubs and turn them into butterflies by having sex with them. I guess there’s something to be said here about a woman reasserting her sexual agency, but weird stories about transgressive sexuality are just not my thing. Also Hand devotes huge chunks of time to talking about raves and clubs. 1/5
Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem - “The Man on the Ceiling” - I enjoyed the conceit of this one - Melanie and Steve, a married couple, take turns metafictionally (?) relaying the effect that Melanie’s lifelong terror/hallucination of a ghostly presence has on their life together, but the story kind of fizzles out without doing much of anything with that conceit. 3/5
M. John Harrison - “The Great God Pan” - Decades ago, three college friends took part in some sort of magic ritual which has proceeded to ruin the rest of their lives, despite the fact that none of them can remember what actually happened that night. Like “The Bees,” this is a very dark story, and the reader is also swept into this sort of claustrophobic hopelessness where the characters find themselves as they suffer the consequences of this action that remains entirely obscured throughout. Harrison later expanded this story into the novel The Course of the Heart, which I wouldn’t mind reading. 4.5/5
Ramsey Campbell - “The Voice of the Beach” - My favorite story in here, and also the one most comfortably situated within the weird/horror tradition - highly reminiscent of “The Willows” and itself echoed later in China Mieville’s “Details.” A reclusive man living on the beach has a friend, recently recovered from a nervous breakdown, come and stay with him. They notice odd patterns and details about the beach, find an abandoned village (complete with a seemingly-incoherent fragmentary diary), the friend (and the narrator!) act increasingly oddly, and things unravel quite nicely. 5/5
Brian Evenson - “Body” - Having enjoyed what I’ve read of Evenson’s in the past, this was a big disappointment. A fragmentary and disjointed account of a man imprisoned and tortured by some monks, and then something about women and tearing shoes apart and... ? 1/5
Kelly Link - “Louise’s Ghost” - A story about two lifelong friends, who are both named Louise, no last names given, so the reader is left to differentiate whom is being discussed by their quirky actions. I would expect to hate this, and it did wear awfully thin, but by the end I couldn’t help enjoying this story a good deal nonetheless. One Louise has a daughter, while the other has a ghost. Things get sad. 3/5
Jonathan Carroll - “The Sadness of Detail” - An interesting setup - an angel recruits an artist to recreate images for an increasingly senile God - that ends right after revealing said setup. 2/5
M. Rickert - “Leda” - A modern retelling of the Greek myth of Leda and the swan, no more, no less. 2/5
Thomas Tessier - “In Praise of Folly” - An appreciator of architectural follies travels to a remote town in New York in order to photograph a garden done up generations ago as a mini-Italy by an eccentric industrialist. Up until the climax, nothing seems amiss (aside from a single reference when he arrives in the town), and this means the horrific element (which is well-done, such as it is), is entirely divorced from the narrative leading up to it (also well-done, such as it was). This was probably the author’s intent, but there could have at least been more of a thematic connection. 3/5
David J. Schow “Plot Twist” - Utter garbage. Three “friends” (a couple and a third wheel, although none of them like one another at all, probably because they are all horribly obnoxious assholes) are stranded in an impossibly-endless desert after their car breaks down on their way to Vegas, after which they spend their time marching and sniping at one another using strings of words that I am not going to dignify by calling “jokes.” The misogyny, which has been growing increasingly bothersome throughout the story, explodes into the foreground at the end. This is, ironically enough, a perfect example of the sort of gleefully gory and sophomorically “edgy” bullshit that this book is supposed to be counteracting. 0/5
Glen Hirshberg “The Two Sams” - As interesting and non-problematic as the story of a man haunted by his two miscarried children could possibly be, I guess. 2/5
Thomas Ligotti “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story” Starts off as a bit of metafictional, humorous “advice” on the different ways to approach writing this kind of story (using the example of man brought to a poor end by a haunted pair of pants). I enjoyed that part, but not so much the following part where the pseudonymous writer ends up haunting his counterpart or whatever it was that ended up happening. It lost my interest, clearly. 2/5
Benjamin Percy “Unearthed” - An unambiguously non-supernatural story about an archaeologist who deals with the loss of his wife by taking an unhealthy interest in excavating (robbing) Native American burial sites. Told from the point of view of his son, this was well-written and kind of compelling in its examination of the different directions their grief took, but... not horrific in any sense? 3/5
Bradford Morrow "Gardener of Heart” - A standard “shocking twist” ghost story written in some impressively overwrought prose. I’ll have to go back to the book to get some choice quotes to include here. ⅖
Peter Straub “Little Red’s Tango” - Another odd inclusion, this is a hagiography of Little Red, an eccentric with a magical collection of jazz records. Teasing out all of the references in that regard was a lot of fun, and this was a well-written story with some interesting variations in form, but aside from a very brief interlude with a vampire (?), not horrific at all. 4.5/5
Stephen King “The Ballad of a Flexible Bullet” - I have yet to read anything by King that I found particularly enjoyable or impressive. A washed-up editor relates to a small party the interminable story of his downfall: when he (a drunk) and a reclusive genius author (a madman) convinced one another that they had magical typewriter elves. 1/5
Joe Hill “20th Century Ghost” - A movie theatre is haunted, rather banally, by the ghost of a teenager who died while watching the Wizard of Oz. Better than his dad’s story, but not by much. 2/5
Ellen Klages “The Green Glass Sea” - An adopted child living at the Los Alamos facility during the Manhattan Project visits the aftermath of the first nuclear bomb test with her family, where they pick up newly-fused pieces of glass. Aside from the rather remote horror of knowing that they are exposing themselves to radiation, this is just a rather straightforward YA story that later became the last chapter of a YA historical fiction novel. Why is this here? 2/5
Tia V. Travis “The Kiss” - I’ve mostly avoided spoilers here but I’m throwing that to the wind with this one. Our protagonist is a grown woman visiting the grave of her mother, who was the active part of a murder/suicide with the protagonist’s father when the protagonist was a young girl. The father was a jazz drummer, and the mother was a starlet/exotic dancer, and we are reminded again and again of how beautiful and alluring the mother was, with or without clothes. To add to the melodrama, the mother was the woman on the side - literally, as she and the daughter lived next door to the father and his icy harridan of a wife. Said harridan refuses to grant the father a divorce despite his pleadings, and the community figures this is what eventually drove the mother to end both their lives. The daughter stumbles in moments after the fact and finds her father already dead and her mother giving up the ghost while kissing his wedding ring.
The twist here is that decades later the daughter, having been raised by the widow to hate her “whore” of a mother, opens her mother’s grave, sees the wedding ring lodged in the skeleton’s throat, surmises that the engraved ring was swallowed in order to provide a clue that the crime was not in fact a murder/suicide but in fact a murder/murder perpetrated by the widow, and then... goes and kisses the ring into the widow’s mouth, fatally choking her. 1/5
Graham Joyce - “Black Dust” - An effectively downtrodden story about poverty and family life in a Welsh mining town. The child protagonist has a relatively happy family life, while his best friend has an abusive father, but the story does an excellent job of portraying him as a human being rather than a one-dimensional villain. The supernatural element of this story is slight, but it packs a punch. 5/5
Neil Gaiman - “October in the Chair” - Has a weird framing story where the months take turns telling each other stories, and I remember thinking that was a stupid disservice to the tale at the heart of this entry (told by October), only now I find that I cannot for the life of me remember what October’s story even was. Having reminded myself, I can say that it was actually the surprisingly fine story of a boy who runs away from home and makes friends with a ghost. 3.5/5
John Crowley - “Missolonghi 1824” - Loyd Byron recounts the story of the time he saved a satyr from an angry mob. Neither horrific nor compelling. 1/5
Rosalind Palermo Stevenson “Insect Dreams” - Another story about an expatriate entomologist, oddly enough - this time the real life Maria Sibylla Merian, a Dutch naturalist who went to the colony of Surinam in 1699 to study insects. She is recounting the story through the haze of malaria, which means it’s all rather fragmentary and verges on stream-of-consciousness at times, and is written in the present tense throughout. The horror manifests itself in the racism of the colonists, which climaxes in another rape scene, which, while at least not being fetishized, is rendered instead in such over-the-top violence that it becomes surreal. Enough already. 2/5
sapphosacademy's review
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
One sentence summary: a lot of stories about a lot of creepy stuff
noramjenkins's review against another edition
1.0
Not my genre, this mix of horror and who knows what. Too odd for me.
crowyhead's review against another edition
5.0
The title of this book misled me slightly, because I was thinking of "new horror" as in "new stories," rather than "stories in a new style of horror" -- and thus was surprised at first to find that some of the stories were at least 25 years old. It speaks to Straub's editorial skills, however, that the older stories blend seamlessly with the newer ones, and for the most part if I hadn't already been familiar with a few of the older stories, I might have thought they were brand new.
Most of the stories in this collection fall into the "weird and unsettling" category, rather than being out-and-out scary. Not all will be to everyone's taste, but there are a lot of gems here, and this is an excellent collection that I would recommend to those who enjoy weird literary fiction and speculative fiction, as well as horror fans.
Most of the stories in this collection fall into the "weird and unsettling" category, rather than being out-and-out scary. Not all will be to everyone's taste, but there are a lot of gems here, and this is an excellent collection that I would recommend to those who enjoy weird literary fiction and speculative fiction, as well as horror fans.
themadmaiden's review against another edition
I'm reminded why I dislike "literature" so and stick to genre fiction. Apparently this book wants to be horror "literature." The first story was alright, 2/5 the next was 1/5 and it went downhill from there. I have better books I can be reading.
chaos13delirium's review against another edition
5.0
This is a wonderful selection of short stories. There are some seriously disturbing, shudder-inducing stories in this book. Absolutely worth a read, really hard to put down.
steveatwaywords's review against another edition
3.0
Some hits and misses, as one would expect. Straub notes in his introduction that the genre of horror (a phrase he finds troublesome) is evolving into a literary genre; hence not all of these stories feel like traditional horror. But there is horror here--whether in the act of rape, the stifling claustrophobia of domesticity, the contagions of delusion. Some writers work in experimental forms to only partial success; others have a good idea but are unable to execute it. Still, at least 1/2 of the works are worthy: Chaon's "The Bees," Hand's "Cleopatra Brimstone," Klage's "The Green Glass Sea," and especially Ligotti's "Notes on the Writing of Horror" are compelling. Ligotti does a nice job of genre-bending and twisting scene. A worthy look!