Inferno Edited by Ellen Datlow
An Anthology of New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural
While stories by KW Jeter, Pat Cadigan, Jeffrey Ford cite The Amityville Horror and other influences, there are also hints of Springsteen, Lovecraft and Whitley Streiber.
Inferno
Edited by Ellen Datlow, Inferno (384pp, ISBN 978-0765315588) is an original anthology of modern horror stories published by Tor Books in late 2007.
Ellen Datlow
Inferno continues Datlow’s fine track record as an editor. She has edited anthologies and magazines since joining Omni magazine in the 1980s, when in the latter part of the decade it was the only magazine to threaten Asimov’s near-total domination of the SF short-fiction scene. In the 2000s she made SciFiction into the first webzine to challenge its print competitor’s hegemony, yet she has always seemed more comfortable with fantasy and horror - her two decade-long co-editorship of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror and previous collections have made her better known as an anthologist.
Bitch Ride to Bethany’s Wood
As befits a modern anthology, Inferno’s stories appear to draw their influences from a multi-media spectrum. KW Jeter –best known for Blade Runner 2- opens the collection with ‘Bitch Ride,’ about a biker desperate for money reduced to running errands for a funeral parlour. If Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born To Run,’ had instead been penned by Nick Cave, it might have read like this; Dark, bitter, yet lyrical.
By contrast, Laird Barron’s ‘The Forest’ is almost Lovecraft-ian, and straight from the pulp magazines. A famous ecologist, his cinematographer, and a beautiful but doomed woman gather at a New England retreat against a backdrop of vast, inhuman intelligence, and a sacrifice. From films The Amityville Horror is name-checked in Jeffrey Ford’s ‘The Bedroom Light,’ an almost contra-horror story.
Several of the stories revolve around children. Nathan Ballingrud’s ‘The Monsters of Heaven,’ features a guilt-soaked father who believes silver-skinned black-eyed aliens (straight from Whitley Streiber’s Communion) hold the key to the whereabouts of his missing son. In ‘13 o’clock’ by Mike O’Connor, the beauty of an isolated South Wales resort is slowly, gradually tainted by the threat to a young boy. The pick is Simon Bestwick’s taut ‘Hushabye,’ where a witness to a horrific attack is driven to intervene, and so put himself at risk. It’s short, snappy, and one of the best in the book. The topic is even inverted in ‘Bethany’s Wood,’ by Paul Finch, when a man desperate to find the mother who abandoned him a decade before trespasses onto a private estate in Northumberland. At times frustratingly over-written, it’s nonetheless effective.
Lucius Shepherd
Several major writers, those who have earned a reputation beyond the fantastic or become bestsellers are represented; Lucius Shepherd, whose ‘The Ease with Which We Freed the Beast’ is as beautifully written as one would expect, while his ever-present anger is never more directly articulated than by the narrator in this story; Stephen Gallagher contributes ‘Misadventure,’ a slight yet poignant story about ghosts and the narrator’s relationship with them; Joyce Carol Oates provides ‘Face,’ the shortest story in the book, yet also one of the most effective, about an old woman and the hideous growth from the side of her neck.
But the very best of the many fine stores in Inferno are by lesser-known writers; ‘Lives,’ by John Grant, for its original revisiting of an old theme, Lee Thomas’ ‘An Apiary of White Bees,’ for its disturbing conflation of pain and pleasure, and ‘The Janus Tree,’ Glen Hirschberg’s acute portrayal of teenage love, pain and possession in a dying Montana mining town. But the very best story in the collection, if good fiction makes the reader look at the world slightly differently, is ‘Stilled Lives,’ by Pat Cadigan, which tells an eerie story of street performers, their hidden lives, and the statuary of London; it’ the outstanding story in an outstanding anthology.
