Atomic Fangirl

[Gotta love anything Ellen Datlow has her hand in. Take it from me, in this Wayback from the late, great Green Man Review. Originally published 10/21/2007]

Ellen Datlow, ed., Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (Tor, 2007)

I love short story compilations. I’ve reviewed several of ’em here at GMR, so when Inferno dropped into our in-box, I held out an eager hand. I didn’t care about what was in it, not really. Quite honestly, to paraphrase the horribly overused line from Jerry Maguire, they had me at terror. It wasn’t until I took a good look at the book itself that I realized that the editor of this collection, Ellen Datlow, is the very same editor that does the honors for the annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. I’ve fallen at her feet before, when reviewing the Years’ Best Fantasy and Horror, volume 18, so I snuggled into my favorite corner and got to reading.

Now, even though I adore horror short stories, having grown up reading Charles L. Grant’s Shadows series, Metahorror and Night Visions (not to mention a deep and abiding love for Richard Christian Matheson’s “Red”), I have a somewhat higher tolerance for what would be considered the truly horrifying, along with a laundry list of outrageously high caliber stories from the masters rattling around in my little brain. In other words, do your worst; even then, I may still end up yawning. Bolstered by the idea of an editor that knows what she’s doing, I dug in hoping to get the pants scared off of me. Or at least loosened a little.

This collection starts out, as they all do, with an Introduction by the editor. Her discussion of “short form” horror is well written, interesting and brief, as all intros should be but quite often fail at. She also gives a sort of shout-out to the best of the best in horror short story compilations, and that list of further reading is reason enough for picking up this book. (Though I have just about all of them in on my bookshelves. Almost.) She describes her selection process for the stories in this book as tales that “provide a frisson of shock or a moment of dread so powerful in might cause the reader outright physical discomfort. . . .” Sounds good to me! How did the stories fare? Continue reading →