Richard Thomas has compiled and edited a remarkable collection of stories in his anthology The New Black: A Neo-Noir Anthology. I’d long despaired of finding literary writing and good ideas in contemporary ‘horror’ after Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes written in 1962. Instead, I’ve felt that from then until now the reading public have for the most part been swamped in cliché characters and ill-thought out storylines. If there have been a few good writers of dark stories over this time, I’ve missed them, [but that is not to say that there haven’t been writers who are well known in the Horror genre of course.] However, having read The New Black, my interest and faith in writing of the dark kind is restored as each story in the anthology is unique and the quality of the writing is excellent.
While all the stories that make up The New Black are unique, there are also a few breath-taking ones. Loneliness is easy to find amongst these stories, and so it should be as it is something humans fear almost as much as death itself. Addiction crops up strongly as well, but I think you could view those two conditions, addiction and loneliness, as being more or less the same thing anyway.
Father, Son, Holy Rabbit by Stephen Graham Jones is one of the two stories I noticed had a slightly Carver-esque quality to it in its simple bold statements and its tenderness. The story idea is fantastic, and when you realise what’s happened, you’re compelled to go back and re-read a bit, this time asking yourself, ‘does the boy know?’ The other story that struck me as Caver-esque was Fuzzyland by Richard Lange. I liked the sinister splinter-sentences that begin to creep in such as, ‘Nobody ever noticed that I would leave the room so cramped with anger that it hurt to breathe.’ The writer takes you on a real journey full of wonderful detail about ordinary American life, and I loved this: ‘A flock of birds scatters across the smoky sky like a handful of gravel.’
Each story is strong and unique in its own right; there is That Baby by Lindsay Hunter whose language use and sentence structure fits so precisely with her wonderfully horrible story, and I loved this image of the baby’s eyes ‘…grey milk ringed with spider’s legs…’. And there’s The Etiquette Of Homicide, a sparse, acidic and frightening story by Tara Laskowski. I loved the sensual writing in Michaela Morrissette’s The Familiars. Her story is one of possession, and it’s a hypnotising read. Another very dark tale is Dial Tone by Benjamin Percy. This story echoes a kind of despair, although it’s written so cleverly that I am unable to explain its darkness properly until towards the end when the story begins to beautifully congeal.
There are stories in this anthology that have terrific endings, The Truth And All Its Ugly by Kyle Minor is one of those, this is an all too ‘human’ story with a wicked ending.
The way the writers have handled the sinister is very different, in some it creeps up slowly as in It’s Against The Law To Feed The Ducks, by Paul Tremblay. A delightful little refrain, perfectly matched to the terrifying inference beneath, punctuates this wistful story that reveals little about itself for quite a while, and what it deals with is so big that it is never told as an outright fact. In other stories the sinister is immediate as in Craig Clevenger’s Act Of Contrition, where the horror is suggested rather than stated. Not only is the setting creepy, but right from the beginning, the attention to detail that only matters to the main character suggests something is very wrong indeed. The writing style is really powerful, the build-up is relentless, and the refrain, ‘I haven’t done anything wrong,’ heightens the tension wonderfully.
I always think there is plenty of horror is to be found in everyday life, and Dredge by Matt Bell is a riveting and very atmospheric story that fits this idea well – ‘When Punter pictures the place where other people keep their feelings, all he sees is his own trapped scream…’ Not only is this a very powerful story, but it’s compulsive reading because you can’t help wanting to know what exactly Punter is going to do. Again, all that happens in Roxane Gay’s simply told and strong story How, is perfectly possible in real life. Some of the darkness here is the nature of the male characters; their fantasies and expectations. The story is encapsulated in, ‘Hanna looks at all the broken people sitting in her living room on her broken furniture…’ And, Blue Hawaii by Rebecca Jones-Howe, an unflinching story about addiction with ants as a repeated theme and clever echoes of longing and loneliness, is again all too possible in real life. Likewise, Sunshine For Adrienne, by Antonia Crane is a powerful and realistic story about addiction with some extraordinary descriptions. Thinking still of ‘real life,’ Rust And Bone by Craig Davidson is a stunner of a story. The writing is awesome and intelligent and the story narrows down to reveal the main character and his life skilfully, and then on top of that, the story itself is excellent. Another one which is not only skilfully written but is a terrific idea for a story is Christopher Hitchens by Vanessa Veselka. One of her characters says, ‘…all beliefs, are like a series of tunnels. What we are after here is an open road.’ It’s a sophisticated and funny story with a strange subtlety, and there are some terrific little phrases such as, ‘Lyle thinks small talk puts people at ease.’ [I love that]. A slightly similar story to this, in that both feature organisations that can change people, is Instituto by Roy Kesey. In this strange and haunting story, Stanley and his surroundings are made perfect and he should be glad, but then he thinks about the three most important people in his life.
The anthology is not without humour and in particular Joe Meno’s odd and enjoyable Children Are The Only Ones Who Blush, is, if creepy, also darkly comic. It brings to mind the novel Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs and it features an ex-psychiatrist with a second career as a dentist, [how could you ever trust him?]
Then there are a couple of stories that were a great pleasure to read and would’ve fitted easily into the more traditional horror genre. The first of these is Dollhouse by Craig Wallwork, whose deadly creepy story is the only one in the anthology that has an old-fashioned ghostly theme. The other was Windeye by Brian Evenson. There is a wonderful spooky premise to this story; a windeye is a special aperture that resembles a window, and it’s how the wind looks into a house. [I love that idea]. This is an extraordinary neat little story that brought Arthur Porges’ Puddle to mind because of its simplicity and magic.
To end, however, I’ve kept His Footsteps Are Made Of Soot by Nik Korpon. The grizzly subject of ‘home-surgery’ is mentioned early on in this story and it is right from the get-go a very creepy story indeed: ‘…pupils floating like drowned flies in a pool of yellowed milk…’ did it for me. For the sheer creepiness embedded in the everyday if you have eyes to see it, this story is stunning!