Phantom

by Paul Tremblay

No ax murderers hunting sexy teens . . . no brutal torture for torture's sake . . . because PHANTOM goes beyond the Paul Tremblay and Sean Wallace have collected fourteen stories by today's most thoughtful writers of horror, each asking the questions beyond what is frightening? This is just the beginning, however, with stories from Steve Rasnic Tem, Lavie Tidhar, F. Brett Cox, Stephen Graham Jones, Steve Berman, Nick Mamatas, Michael Cisco, among other fresh voices in horror. From paranoid gold prospectors to lonely curators, Satan-worshipping Long Island teens, metaphysics-obsessed television reporters, and to Peter and Olivia and their devastating final choices detailed in the last pages of this anthology, the fourteen stories of Phantom present their horrors differently, but they all How does anyone live through this?

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Anthologies

Nook

First published July 15, 2009

About the author

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, the Sheridan Le Fanu, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of the New York Times bestselling Horror Movie, The Beast You, Are, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted as the Universal Pictures film Knock at the Cabin. His short fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family. He is represented by Stephen Barbara, InkWell Management.

Reviews

[Jesse Bullington · Rating 5 out of 5]

Determining how to rate an anthology such as this is tricky, as I didn't feel all of the stories earned 5, or even 4 stars, but looking over the table of contents again I feel the anthology as a whole deserves a five star rating. The editors Wallace and Tremblay have done a bang-up job assembling an array of stories that are tied together by an almost ephemeral theme, one which becomes more and more obvious the deeper one gets into the anthology. The tagline of "going beyond the scare" describes the antho rather well as a whole, and it's an underused concept--too often horror is the lead up to violence and the violence itself, whereas here violence is sometimes the catalyst, sometimes the conclusion, but never the entirety of the tale.

I didn't love all the stories in the anthology, and a few I didn't even like, but that's the way with most any anthology and should hardly be counted against the work as a whole, which is by and large excellent. In a reversal of what I usually go in for a lot of my favorite stories were the ones where the supernatural was utterly absent--the horror of the mundane world. Nick Mamatas's "A Stain on the Stone," Karen Heuler's "After Images," Stephen Graham Jones's "The Ones That Got Away," and Vylar Kaftan's "What President Polk Said" were stand outs in this regard.

The stories that employed more fantastic elements were arranged in the table of contents so that the mundane and the supernatural could bleed into one another, and overall the arrangement of stories was quite effective. "The Cabinet Child" by Steve Rasnic Tem, "Kinder" by Steve Berman, and "Invasive species" by Carrie Laben were my favorite stories that could be considered to contain something a step beyond the real world horror of the previously mentioned reality-bound stories, but part of the appeal to these stories is that the fantastic is used in conjunction with a strong human heart instead of being the sort of monster mash you might find in a lesser anthology. Not that I'm opposed to a good monster mash, mind, this just isn't that sort of anthology. This is more of a contemplative, brooding collection, and one that succeeds at capturing a more subtle variety of horror than is commonly found in the genre.

[S. Wideman · Rating 2 out of 5]

For most people who know me, know that I really do like horror novels. In fact, if one looks at my shelf, it's mostly horror. So, when I picked this book up at Balticon (for free, bargain!) I was so excited. A bunch of short horror stories was right up my alley. Unfortunately, this book disappointed me. Mainly because every time I got into a story, it ended. They were too short. And not really scary. There was almost no suspense in many of them, and the fact the author had to cram so much into such a small space made for a very confusing set of stories.

For example, "The End of Everything" by Steve Eller was very good. Way too short and sounded more like a prologue than a whole story. And "Jonquils Bloom" by Geoffrey H. Goodwin had a wonderful idea behind it, but crammed a novel-length idea into like three pages of story. Other stories, like "A Ghost, A House" by Becca De La Rosa and "Kinder" by Steve Berman were so confusing that I couldn't make up my mind if they were meant to be scary or not. And "The Ones Who Got Away" by Stephen Graham Jones had so much build up that the ending was a major let down. The three pages or so that story was dedicated itself to this grand scare, only to have it all happen after a fade to black cop out.

While I think many of the authors who contributed to this book have talent, I don't think such short stories are their cup of tea. A lot of what I read would have been brilliant if longer.

[Alicia · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is complete and utter tripe. It is the Target dollar bin of short story collections, no offense meant to the Target dollar bins. I kept reading it hoping for one story that made it more than anything but a waste of my life, some hint of redemption...to no avail. Keep in mind, this is a horror collection, so I wanted it to be awful in that glorious, spooky way. This was merely boring, disjointed, poorly conceived, and badly written.

[Jeannie Sloan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would classify this book horror light.Not that there is anything wrong with that.I would have liked to see some longer stories here though.It is hard to get into stories,at least for me,that are only a few short pages long.
I got this book at the library and it was what I expected.It's a fine anthology but nothing too original is written in the stories contained in this book.

[David Dunnagan · Rating 2 out of 5]

It boasts of "going beyond the scare", but it felt like we never got to the scare in the first place. Most of the stories are simply not frightening, merely unusual or a bit trance-like. The imagery is often lush, especially in the stories which resemble more a bad trip than a short story. This was easily the most enjoyable aspect of the collection. What really kept me from enjoying the book, though, was the pitiful length of these stories.

More than half of the stories end before they begin at all. There was rarely any kind of satisfaction or conclusion. They just end. As if the writer had no idea how to move forward. Or if they decided to make rent by selling the first chapter of their novel as a short story.

Not a total waste of time, but disappointing.

[Teresa · Rating 1 out of 5]

I only read the first story but being that I hated it so much I couldn't continue.

[Michael Allen Cox · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I'm just too used to the earlier work of King, Koontz and Barker but this was a very disappointing collection compiled by the author of Cabin at the end of the World and Head full of Ghosts. Except for the story by Stephen Graham Jones, this was a total waste of time. I struggled thru the entire book hoping for something other than mediocrity or at least one story that made any sense at all and failed horribly. Tremblay probably should concentrate on writing instead of trying to use his name to promote bad actors.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this collection of short stories. I think my favorite was the one about the serial killer who got trapped in a world of zombies and could not escape because none of the zombies would kill him. He had to live out the rest of his life in that world. I thought that was unique take on the zombie genre. Some of the other stories were very strange, more like bizarro then harder – for example the one with the little German children who invaded homes and chewed on furniture, and apparently were targeted by exterminator's who called them kinder. That story was pretty bizarre, but I enjoyed it for some reason. There was also a horror story set in the old West, the story of a high school student who takes other high school students on tours of bloody murder sites, and others.. Overall, I like this book

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seeing as how I’ve never before read an anthology, I’m not really sure how I should go about rating one.

There were a few stories that I thoroughly enjoyed and found truly thought provoking, a few others that I didn’t get at all, and which left me feeling more confused than stimulated; and a couple others still that I flat out did not like, and did not think worth my time.

Given the short stature of most of the included stories, however, I did find that the good outweighed the bad; and that overall, it was worth the quick read.

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read it, didn't think much of it. Except that Ellen Datlow, career anthologist and editor, earns her keep. Most of the stories here felt like they needed more work to make them really shine. I just finished Datlow's Supernatural Noir, and even though some of the authors are the same, the difference seems very obvious. Editing is hard, maybe especially for a genre like horror, which can so easily clang. This one clanged for me.

[Bandit · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the idea behind this anthology, the literary horror collection...the execution was just ok at best. The stories tried to be something in the vein of the main theme, but failed time and again and mostly came out boring. Not many well known authors and none of them made any sort of a positive impression. One of the weakest anthologies I have read in ages.

[Bekki McClish]

Pretty good! I was surprised. I only had to skim/skip one story.