Beyond the Veil
Beyond the Veil
edited by Mark Morris. With stories by Christopher Golden, Matthew Holness, Priya Sharma, Dan Coxon, Aliya Whiteley, Toby Litt, Josh Malerman, Angeline B. Adams, Remco van Straten, Bracken MacLeod, Jeremy Dyson, Lisa L. Hannett, Karter Mycroft, Stephen Gallagher, Lisa Tuttle, Peter Harness, Lynda E. Rucker,John Everson, Nathan Ballingrud, Frank J. Oreto and Gemma Files.
Flame Tree Press, 2021
320 pages
This brand new, all-original short stories anthology provides a glimpse of the current state of horror themes and brings forth a couple of stand out authors in the genre.
The second volume in the anthology series edited by Mark Morrris prides itself in not being a themed commissioned book like others in the market, and it has the advantage of showcasing surprising and random stories in the horror genre without depending on a keyword. A few of the stories deal with the use of the unknown for personal benefit: take for example Christopher Golden’s The Gold Bag in which the protagonist mother asks for wishes by writing them on a piece of paper and putting them inside a mysterious bag. But there is a price to pay for the wishes granted; Also, Frank J. Oreto’s The Care And Feeding Of Household Gods deals with mysterious forces when the protagonist, starting as a joke, gives household objects the status of gods so that he can ask them for favors while the ‘sacrifice’ said objects demand get bigger and bigger; A twist on this theme can be found in Stephen Gallagher’s A Mystery For Julie Chu in which Julie finds by chance a magical object that could be good or bad, depending on the person receiving it. She tries to sell it nonetheless, and if she can make an extra buck for the collateral damage, she’ll take it; One of the most inventive and, probably, the best written story in this collection is Lisa L. Hannet’s If, Then in which a gardener uses magical plants to seal up a castle where his loved one remains sick. He bewitches the people inside and alone he remains, trying to find a cure and doing several experiments, some of them quite gory. It’s the way Hannet mixes the botanical and the mythical language, the thing that remains with the reader after finishing it. But this being a horror anthology, there are at east three that truly do justice to the genre and those are: Jeremy Dyson’s Nurse Varden in which a man has a fear of being unconscious and his psychologist tries to regress his memory in order to find the original reason for that fear. However, the protagonist gets more than he bargained for because he remembers a nurse that he hadn’t thought about before and soon starts to have visions where he sees her everywhere; Another truly spooky story is Mathew Holness’ The Caker Man in which a weird neighbor gives out cakes to the kids who live next door. At first, one of the boys think that he’s interested in pleasing his mother, but soon realizes the man is fixated on his little sister. The boy tries to protect his family, but the man has some devious resources the boy may not have considered before; And the last horror — and gore — story that truly fits the genre is Toby Litt’s The Dark Bit in which a married couple gets hurt by walking by a part of their home after having a strange nightmare. Firstly, is the husband who gets cut by an invisible knife or string, and because the mystery is too great, he walks by it on purpose in order to find the reason. Soon his curiosity spreads to his wife and both of them start cutting themselves to find whether there is something beneath their skin that they are not seeing. Talk about a deadly obsession.
Some stories fall into familiar territory — meetings with ghosts, parental issues, long-lost places — but there is a novelty in the prose of a few of the writers here, and that alone can become the favorite part of a story even if the theme sounds cliché to most of the veteran horror readers. ~
