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_ash_mac's review
dark
emotional
fast-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
3.5
I don’t know if I should technically count this as finished because I got about 10 stories in and was put into a reading slump so serious that I just had to skip to Cutter’s story (and was so worth it for The Crack alone, Cutter has really won my heart over)
A few were excellent, a few were horrible, but happy I got through the ones I got through. (And happy that I was able to read a Cutter short story, so worth it! The Crack is a new favourite!)
A few were excellent, a few were horrible, but happy I got through the ones I got through. (And happy that I was able to read a Cutter short story, so worth it! The Crack is a new favourite!)
engrossedreader's review against another edition
3.0
Horror/dark fiction set in cities. Some stories more enjoyable than others.
smartcassart's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.75
Only liked 2 out of 19 stories -- that's not good. M.R. Carey's "We'll Always Have Paris" and Nick Cutter's "Crack"
megapolisomancy's review against another edition
3.0
Original dark shorts about cities, supposedly, running the gamut from straight horror through weird fiction to urban fantasy. Some clunkers, but also a good number of solid creepy entries from the usual heavy hitters. A disappointing number were just stories that happened to take place in a city, rather than centering the cityscape or urban crowds or terroir or whatever. I know psychogeography has become a joke but this was the perfect opportunity to explore it in a meaningfully weird way!
The Dogs • Scott Smith
A craiglist escort lucks into a Manhattan apartment that seems too good to be true (aside from the three telepathic dogs she has to live with). She's a bit of a loser, and it's easy to not ask for more and to give the dogs what they want, until it isn't. Almost had some interesting things to say about complicity, but lost itself to a sophomoric desperation to shock. Ugh. 1/5
In Stone • Tim Lebbon
"The city eats people." A man unable to get over the death of a friend goes on late night walks through London. He sees people vanish, and the city sees him seeing. A nicely melancholy affair, drenched with rainwater and puddles and echoes of "Evening Primrose" and Campbell's "The Brood." 4/5
The Way She Is with Strangers • Helen Marshall
Also a rather gently sad story about a recently-divorced woman who moves from a small town to Manchester and, worrying about rebuilding and resizing and losing and filling empty space, becomes a psychopomp of some sort. Her name is Mercy and her daughter is Comfort; the whole story has a mythical/folkloric approach that suits the material well. 4/5
We'll Always Have Paris • M. R. Carey
Whoa. We're off-kilter from the get-go as our hardboiled protagonist, a Parisian detective, casually mentions the 14th arondissement, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Alhambra all in a single neighborhood. Also, Paris recently suffered a zombie uprising and there's a serial killer on the loose. The movie Dark City, if it were more of a gonzo post-modern melange (the voice manages to be both noir and romantic/arch). I'm not totally sure it sticks the landing, but it was inventive and interesting enough that I'm also not totally sure that matters. 5/5
Good Night, Prison Kings • Cherie Priest
A recently-deceased woman finds herself, ghostly, in a ghostly city, figuring out how to take care of unfinished business with two of her miscreant cousins. Her dissipation and confusion (and the miasma swirling through the city) are nicely rendered, although the actual revelations and revenge left me cold. The struggle to remember was the interesting part, not the being-remembered or the acting-on-the-remembrance. 3/5
Dear Diary • Scott Sigler
A man moves to Philly to be near his married girlfriend and, living with chronic back pain after an unspecified accident, drives away everyone who loves him in favor of the connection he feels with his apartment and its past tenants, whose stories are all set down in the same diary. The story takes place entirely within the apartment, making the point over and over again of how easy it is to be alone even when surrounded by other people. Achronological and interspersed with the (melodramatic) diary entries, this one succeeds on a thematic and structural level despite some occasionally clunky prose and characters who could've used a bit more fleshing out (married girlfriend, I'm looking at you). Flashes of Leiber, the master of this kind of urban weirdness; also strongly reminds me of a story whose title I can't quite put my finger on - I thought it was "The Beckoning Fair One" but it involved a found manuscript, and it's entirely possible I've combined TBFO and Kiernan's _The Red Tree_ into a story that doesn't actually exist. 4/5
What I've Always Done • Amber Benson
Short urban fantasy about an asshole "fixer" in Portland who does bad things. Not for me. 2/5
Grit • Jonathan Maberry
Also urban fantasy, the noir-ish story of a bail bondsman with magic tattoos, the ghosts who follow him, caricatured drug dealers, and the diner waitress who deserves better than her lot in life. Has sections of transcribed text messages, but it shouldn't have. 2/5
Dark Hill Run • Kasey Lansdale and Joe R. Lansdale
A man gets hypnotized to quit smoking and accidentally calls forth the revenant of his childhood bully. Old-fashioned and uninspired. 2/5
Happy Forever • Simon R. Green
An expert thief of things magical and arcane has to rescue his ex-girlfriend from the House where time stands still. Like "We'll Always Have Paris," a noir-inspired voice, replete with bad hardboiled dialogue ("It's been years since I last saw you. Ten years since my daughter Julia disappeared."), but a mirror image here where a story that seemed to be going through rote motions was redeemed by a fantastic ending. 4/5
The Society of the Monsterhood • Paul Tremblay
Interesting headings, a convincingly-conversational tone, second person, weirdness as an examination of poverty and communities that lose people, the unfairness of the status quo, an interesting monster, this story has it all. 5/5
The Maw • Nathan Ballingrud
An entry in his loosely-related series about Hell, here after it's exploded into a neighborhood of London (maybe?) and a young guide takes in an old man who's interested in more than just sightseeing. Beautiful and forlorn, exactly my kind of setting; I'm pretty sure Ballingrud can do no wrong. 5/5
Field Trip • Tananarive Due
A teacher, well-meaning but in way over her head, takes her inner city 6th grade class (one of whom recently lost her brother to police violence) on a field trip. An illegible announcement on an unfamiliar subway (one of life's greatest anxieties) heralds further loss. An absolutely gutting story. 5/5
The Revelers • Christopher Golden
An old friend (a liar and "a bit of a prick") shows up to drag our protagonist off to a night of partying in Manhattan. Haziness abounds, both supernatural and chemically-induced, people slip in and out of time, no one can escape the endless grind of the city's social scene with their youth intact, etc etc. 2/5
The Stillness • Ramsey Campbell
A retired accountant becomes fixated on a human statue "performing" (?) outside the thrift store where he works (to avoid spending too much time sitting still, both literally and metaphorically). Typical latter-day Campbell, a beautiful accretion of off-kilter details before a final horrific denouement. 5/5
Sanctuary • Kealan Patrick Burke
A child struggles to understand the disintegration of his parents' relationship and the city they live in and even of his parents themselves. A surreal nightmare of a story, like a darker, perverse Bruno Schulz. This one deserves re-reading, I think. 4/5
Matter of Life and Death • Sherrilyn Kenyon
Weird things happen to an editor after her star author, horrible to work with, drops dead. Or do they, and was she, and did she? Take that, every editor who was ever mean to Sherrilyn Kenyon. Badly-deployed cliches and worse prose. Also a surreal nightmare of a story, but not in a good way. 1/5
Graffiti of the Lost and Dying Places • Seanan McGuire
A convenience store clerk in a rapidly-gentrifying Financial District is being priced out of her job and her home, but the city, in pain and lashing out, fails to commiserate. Creepy, quietly despairing, and timely. 5/5
The Crack • Nick Cutter
Our protagonist, our awful, toxic, irredeemable protagonist, is at his wit's end with his crying toddler, who is absolutely terrified of being left in his room alone at night. Our tiresome, narcissistic protagonist is similarly fed up with his "weak" wife, and befuddled at the crack in the wall of his son's room, even though he himself, a construction foreman by trade, built the house. There's a time-honored tradition in horror stories of producing a protagonist that you actively anticipate something awful happening to, and this guy is an all-time champion of the trope. He is, frankly, exhausting to read about, but good on Cutter for taking on toxic masculinity so directly, and the "something awful" is devastating and unsettling when it comes. There is, however, absolutely nothing urban about this one. It takes place in a house, and maybe the house is in a city, but it could just as easily be in the middle of nowhere. Let's call this a 4.75/5
The Dogs • Scott Smith
A craiglist escort lucks into a Manhattan apartment that seems too good to be true (aside from the three telepathic dogs she has to live with). She's a bit of a loser, and it's easy to not ask for more and to give the dogs what they want, until it isn't. Almost had some interesting things to say about complicity, but lost itself to a sophomoric desperation to shock. Ugh. 1/5
In Stone • Tim Lebbon
"The city eats people." A man unable to get over the death of a friend goes on late night walks through London. He sees people vanish, and the city sees him seeing. A nicely melancholy affair, drenched with rainwater and puddles and echoes of "Evening Primrose" and Campbell's "The Brood." 4/5
The Way She Is with Strangers • Helen Marshall
Also a rather gently sad story about a recently-divorced woman who moves from a small town to Manchester and, worrying about rebuilding and resizing and losing and filling empty space, becomes a psychopomp of some sort. Her name is Mercy and her daughter is Comfort; the whole story has a mythical/folkloric approach that suits the material well. 4/5
We'll Always Have Paris • M. R. Carey
Whoa. We're off-kilter from the get-go as our hardboiled protagonist, a Parisian detective, casually mentions the 14th arondissement, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Alhambra all in a single neighborhood. Also, Paris recently suffered a zombie uprising and there's a serial killer on the loose. The movie Dark City, if it were more of a gonzo post-modern melange (the voice manages to be both noir and romantic/arch). I'm not totally sure it sticks the landing, but it was inventive and interesting enough that I'm also not totally sure that matters. 5/5
Good Night, Prison Kings • Cherie Priest
A recently-deceased woman finds herself, ghostly, in a ghostly city, figuring out how to take care of unfinished business with two of her miscreant cousins. Her dissipation and confusion (and the miasma swirling through the city) are nicely rendered, although the actual revelations and revenge left me cold. The struggle to remember was the interesting part, not the being-remembered or the acting-on-the-remembrance. 3/5
Dear Diary • Scott Sigler
A man moves to Philly to be near his married girlfriend and, living with chronic back pain after an unspecified accident, drives away everyone who loves him in favor of the connection he feels with his apartment and its past tenants, whose stories are all set down in the same diary. The story takes place entirely within the apartment, making the point over and over again of how easy it is to be alone even when surrounded by other people. Achronological and interspersed with the (melodramatic) diary entries, this one succeeds on a thematic and structural level despite some occasionally clunky prose and characters who could've used a bit more fleshing out (married girlfriend, I'm looking at you). Flashes of Leiber, the master of this kind of urban weirdness; also strongly reminds me of a story whose title I can't quite put my finger on - I thought it was "The Beckoning Fair One" but it involved a found manuscript, and it's entirely possible I've combined TBFO and Kiernan's _The Red Tree_ into a story that doesn't actually exist. 4/5
What I've Always Done • Amber Benson
Short urban fantasy about an asshole "fixer" in Portland who does bad things. Not for me. 2/5
Grit • Jonathan Maberry
Also urban fantasy, the noir-ish story of a bail bondsman with magic tattoos, the ghosts who follow him, caricatured drug dealers, and the diner waitress who deserves better than her lot in life. Has sections of transcribed text messages, but it shouldn't have. 2/5
Dark Hill Run • Kasey Lansdale and Joe R. Lansdale
A man gets hypnotized to quit smoking and accidentally calls forth the revenant of his childhood bully. Old-fashioned and uninspired. 2/5
Happy Forever • Simon R. Green
An expert thief of things magical and arcane has to rescue his ex-girlfriend from the House where time stands still. Like "We'll Always Have Paris," a noir-inspired voice, replete with bad hardboiled dialogue ("It's been years since I last saw you. Ten years since my daughter Julia disappeared."), but a mirror image here where a story that seemed to be going through rote motions was redeemed by a fantastic ending. 4/5
The Society of the Monsterhood • Paul Tremblay
Interesting headings, a convincingly-conversational tone, second person, weirdness as an examination of poverty and communities that lose people, the unfairness of the status quo, an interesting monster, this story has it all. 5/5
The Maw • Nathan Ballingrud
An entry in his loosely-related series about Hell, here after it's exploded into a neighborhood of London (maybe?) and a young guide takes in an old man who's interested in more than just sightseeing. Beautiful and forlorn, exactly my kind of setting; I'm pretty sure Ballingrud can do no wrong. 5/5
Field Trip • Tananarive Due
A teacher, well-meaning but in way over her head, takes her inner city 6th grade class (one of whom recently lost her brother to police violence) on a field trip. An illegible announcement on an unfamiliar subway (one of life's greatest anxieties) heralds further loss. An absolutely gutting story. 5/5
The Revelers • Christopher Golden
An old friend (a liar and "a bit of a prick") shows up to drag our protagonist off to a night of partying in Manhattan. Haziness abounds, both supernatural and chemically-induced, people slip in and out of time, no one can escape the endless grind of the city's social scene with their youth intact, etc etc. 2/5
The Stillness • Ramsey Campbell
A retired accountant becomes fixated on a human statue "performing" (?) outside the thrift store where he works (to avoid spending too much time sitting still, both literally and metaphorically). Typical latter-day Campbell, a beautiful accretion of off-kilter details before a final horrific denouement. 5/5
Sanctuary • Kealan Patrick Burke
A child struggles to understand the disintegration of his parents' relationship and the city they live in and even of his parents themselves. A surreal nightmare of a story, like a darker, perverse Bruno Schulz. This one deserves re-reading, I think. 4/5
Matter of Life and Death • Sherrilyn Kenyon
Weird things happen to an editor after her star author, horrible to work with, drops dead. Or do they, and was she, and did she? Take that, every editor who was ever mean to Sherrilyn Kenyon. Badly-deployed cliches and worse prose. Also a surreal nightmare of a story, but not in a good way. 1/5
Graffiti of the Lost and Dying Places • Seanan McGuire
A convenience store clerk in a rapidly-gentrifying Financial District is being priced out of her job and her home, but the city, in pain and lashing out, fails to commiserate. Creepy, quietly despairing, and timely. 5/5
The Crack • Nick Cutter
Our protagonist, our awful, toxic, irredeemable protagonist, is at his wit's end with his crying toddler, who is absolutely terrified of being left in his room alone at night. Our tiresome, narcissistic protagonist is similarly fed up with his "weak" wife, and befuddled at the crack in the wall of his son's room, even though he himself, a construction foreman by trade, built the house. There's a time-honored tradition in horror stories of producing a protagonist that you actively anticipate something awful happening to, and this guy is an all-time champion of the trope. He is, frankly, exhausting to read about, but good on Cutter for taking on toxic masculinity so directly, and the "something awful" is devastating and unsettling when it comes. There is, however, absolutely nothing urban about this one. It takes place in a house, and maybe the house is in a city, but it could just as easily be in the middle of nowhere. Let's call this a 4.75/5
jhstack's review
4.0
Good collection of city-centric (mostly) horror stories from some notable authors. Some feel like more of a slog than others, and others I wanted to go on for longer because of the world that was being constructed in such a limited space.
moongladewinterberry's review against another edition
4.0
Average rating: 3.5.
My faves were:
The Dogs by Scott Smith - 5/5
In Stone by Tim Lebbon - 4/5
What I've Always Done by Amber Benson - 5/5
Grit by Jonathan Maberry - 5/5
Dark Hill Run by Kasey Lansdale & Joe R. Lansdale - 5/5
The Revelers by Christopher Golden - 4/5
The Sanctuary by Kealan Patrick Burke - 4/5
A Matter of Life and Death by Sherrilyn Kenyon - 5/5
The Crack by Nick Cutter - 4/5
My faves were:
The Dogs by Scott Smith - 5/5
In Stone by Tim Lebbon - 4/5
What I've Always Done by Amber Benson - 5/5
Grit by Jonathan Maberry - 5/5
Dark Hill Run by Kasey Lansdale & Joe R. Lansdale - 5/5
The Revelers by Christopher Golden - 4/5
The Sanctuary by Kealan Patrick Burke - 4/5
A Matter of Life and Death by Sherrilyn Kenyon - 5/5
The Crack by Nick Cutter - 4/5
marleymut's review against another edition
dark
1.0
Book full of short stories. Worst book I've read this year and possibly ever. Most stories were awful... some were ok but not many. I'm so thrilled to be done with this garbage. Could be I don't enjoy short stories or these are just really bad short stories. I have another book full of mystery short stories and I will see if it is any better or more of the same. UGH
ewo2's review against another edition
4.0
Lots of great work in this book, and it helped me discover a few new (to me) authors. My personal favorites were Sanctuary, The Maw, The Crack, The Revelers, and Graffiti of Lost and Dying Places.