Edited by Mark Morris
(Flame Tree Press, 2020)
Introduction by Mark Morris
[....]There are Victorian tales here; there are contemporary tales; there are near-future tales, in which the very prescient threat of environmental collapse lurks in the background. There are supernatural and non-supernatural stories; there are stories of ancient magic and dark mysticism; there are stories that defy categorization.
[....]The premise for After Sundown is simple. As editor, my brief was to produce an anthology of twenty stories, sixteen of which would be commissioned from some of the top names writing in the genre today, and the other four of which would be selected via a two-week submissions window that would be open to everybody, with the aim being not only to discover new talent, but also to give that talent the opportunity to share anthology space with the genre's best....
* * *
Butterfly Island by C.J. Tudor
After Sundown opens on a weak note with this glib, awkwardly executed doomsday virus survival adventure. Strangers barely worthy of a TV movie travel to an island for refuge. It is an island previously used by a plutocrat as a butterfly preserve.
"So, what do we do now?" Alison asks, looking at me.
"Well, we either chance the jungle or try our luck climbing down into the ravine. Either way, we'll probably die."
"Great."
"Plus, if what Ray says is true, there's another boat coming. And if Ray doesn't meet them—"
"You think they'll come ashore?"
"Maybe."
"And try to kill us
"Probably."
"Oh, good."
"And we still have the problem of butterflies with the human-munchies and a crazed killer roaming the island."
The carnivorous butterflies may recall Machen's 1917 novel The Terror. Imagine if Machen had treated his material with Tudor's level of trite banality?
* * *
Research by Tim Lebbon
I enjoyed Lebbon's intimate 2015 end of the world thriller The Silence, as I remarked here. He is a skilled craftsman, economical and stylistically at ease with himself.
"Research" is a domestic psychological thriller. A married couple kidnap their neighbor (our narrator), a successful thriller writer finishing his new novel. Confined to a basement, the writer assumes the couple is conducting research: they must want to see how he will change when not allowed to exorcize his demons through the written word.
It takes about two months, but they find out.
* * *
Swanskin by Alison Littlewood
Weird tales convey themselves to readers with fullness of affect, sleek and adamant as a piece of music. "Swanskin" by Alison Littlewood is a signal failure in this respect. The shapeliness and patience of composition, and the music itself, never appear.
"Swanskin" is isolated fishing village folk horror about man's inhumanity to woman. Not a radical theme, but Littlewood manages to further banalize it.
At evening, we sit before the fire, my aging relative and I. She rocks in her chair, staring into the flames while my gaze is drawn, over and over, to the window. There is nothing out there but the dark. It is parcelled into tiny squares by the leaded glass.
"You begin to see, then," she says.
I turn to her. Each crease on her face bears its own deep shadow. Her eyes look rheumy, as if damp with tears.
"See what, Aunt?" I call her Aunt, but she is more distant than that in relation. Still, she has never blamed me for burdening her; she never reminds me of the thinness of our bond, that I am a stranger here.
She takes the pipe from between her lips, freeing a skein of mist scented of sandalwood and cloves.
"You'll know the truth soon enough." She gestures towards the window with the pipe's stem, just as a pale shape passes across the sky.
"The swans," she says. "They winter here. But here is not their home. That is what you sense, boy, when you look at them." She silences me with another wave of her pipe.
"Sometimes, a swan may shed her feathery skin. She casts it off and becomes a lovely maiden. And if a man should steal her skin – why, then she will stay, and keep her human shape, and be his wife, as long as her skin is kept from her. But sometimes, a whole flight of her sisters will come. They will try to free their sister and her swanskin."
Her eyes reflect the fire's gleam. "You should beware," she says. "Find a nice girl. A good girl. Not—" She spits, mutters something about unnatural forms.
* * *
That's the Spirit by Sarah Lotz
"That's the Spirit" is a well-written story conveying the tang of life's quiet desperations. In it, a psychic previously exposed as a fraud appears to get real messages about a missing girl.
* * *
Gave by Michael Bailey
He'd been giving blood for four years, every fifty-six days, and platelets in between – his mother and father still alive, his marriage and children still ten years in the future.
The woman behind the counter was new because the prior one had died. Michael knew this one would die, too, because everyone around him had started dying four years earlier.
It had something to do with the blood.
He knew the exact number, the day this hell began, the same way every boy and girl in the world knew the number: 17,989,101,196… the highest population of people ever recorded.
This had happened four years ago, back in high school.
A website was established, everyone mad with numbers and eager to see world population hit fifteen billion. Cell phone apps were created. You could find the counter just about anywhere, everyone waiting for the big day. How this ticker kept track of all death and life was a mystery to Michael, yet every time the number hit a new billion thereafter, people held parties, monitored the counters in schools, on screens, celebrating the explosion of life, despite the maladies created from overpopulation. Michael was in his history class when it happened, his teacher obsessed with watching the number grow. Mr. Laurensen had the counter displayed on a screen at the back of the room, kids craning their necks every so often to look.
"The monitor's stuck," someone had said, maybe Charlie Hanlon, and when his teacher asked what Charlie had said, he said it again. The life counter wasn't stuck, of course, but had tipped the fragile balance between life and death. For a few moments the 196 at the end stayed 196, long enough for everyone to see… and then it had dropped to 195, and then 194.
Never before had the number decreased.
"Gave" by Michael Bailey is a modest piece about dying humanity, not the whole mosaic. Perhaps that is what gives the story such melancholy power. Moments of protagonist Mr. Shoe's life pertaining to earth's declining population, from secondary school to senescence, bear witness to the man's fears, retreats, and ultimate regrets.
It's good to have fine stories like this. What reader wants to reach their last days before seeing how desperate and bittersweet will be the last summing-up?
* * *
Wherever You Look by Ramsey Campbell
"Wherever You Look" is worth the price of this anthology.
The shadow on the pavement has grown human in its stature, if less so in its shape, by the time a man answers his next call. "Just For Your Shelf."
"I'm trying to track down a book I once read."
"If it's any good we've got it or we'll get it." He sounds not far from tired of saying so, but adds "What's the name?"
"Mine? Maurice Lavater."
"Not yours. The one you think I ought to know."
"I think perhaps you might know mine. I'm a writer."
p "Really." With no increase of enthusiasm the bookseller says "Published?"
"Six novels and a seventh on the way."
"Maurice Lavater." As if he's solved that problem the bookseller says "May I ask your field?"
"My publishers call them supernatural thrillers." In case this sounds defensive Maurice says "So do I."
"That explains my lack of recognition. We wouldn't have you in the shop." Before Maurice can react the bookseller says "Must I assume the book you're seeking is your kind?"
"I believe you could say so."
"I wouldn't, no." More dismissively still the bookseller says "You should consult a specialist."
When he grasps that this is all the help the man intends to offer, Maurice can't resist asking "Do you sell many books?"
"Enough." Although this sounds like a bid to end the conversation, the man says. "And yourself?"
"Plenty."
"No doubt you're bound to."
"Wherever You Look" is one of the strongest stories Campbell has produced: dead-pan hilarity braided with the uncanny.
* * *
Same Time Next Year by Angela Slatter
"Same Time Next Year" is an eloquent posthumous fantasy. It describes, from the "other side," those ghost sightings that occur on anniversaries of violent death or tragedy.
* * *
Mine Seven by Elana Gomel
My post about "Mine Seven" can be found here.
Cards on the table: Gomel is a FB acquaintance. When she mentioned the subject matter of "Mine Seven" I bought After Sundown sight unseen.
* * *
It Doesn't Feel Right by Michael Marshall Smith
"It Doesn't Feel Right" is one of the finest, most assured and upsetting short stories I have read. It is sublimity on a par with slices of suburban life by Etchison and Klein.
* * *
Creeping Ivy by Laura Purcell
Purcell clearly has the knack. "Creeping Ivy'' is a consummate tale of retributive supernatural "justice."
29th October
I did not sleep well. Most likely I over-exerted myself wreaking havoc in the greenhouse. I could not find a comfortable position in my bed. My back itched and prickled.
Last night's wind really was fierce. It caused the ivy to rattle not just against my study window, but the casement in my bedchamber too; an infernal tap, tap that grated upon my nerves. I was not aware, until now, that the creeper actually stretched as far as the bedroom window.
I have never noticed it scratching before.
* * *
Last Rites for the Fourth World by Rick Cross
Short stories about globe-girdling uncanny events with millions of observers are rarely done well. Rick Cross accomplishes the goal with confidence. His story jumps between surfers, soldiers, and first-responders around the world whose routines are shattered by "increasingly strange and terrible miracles, every one thousands of miles from their fabled place of origin."
* * *
We All Come Home by Simon Bestwick
[....]And all this time, the things in the ruins and the woods had been waiting, for the return of the one who'd got away.
Lennox returns as an adult to the wild ruins where, as a boy, his two best friends disappeared. Lennox was left with traumatic amnesia but hopes memories can be sparked by a final survey of the grounds. Out of this, Bestwick builds a framework of real seriousness. Tonal missteps in the final paragraphs only partially thwart this achievement.
* * *
The Importance of Oral Hygiene by Robert Shearman
Shearman gives the reader a beguiling set of kaleidoscopic turns in "The Importance of Oral Hygiene." Whoever the narrator turns out to be, the theme of this faux Victoriana is "I was not inclined to love a dentist."
As it turns out, inclination had little to do with it.
* * *
Bokeh by Thana Niveau
[....]The ginger girl was stumbling to her feet, waving her hands madly all around her head. Vera tried to focus. That couldn't possibly be a whole cloud of bugs surrounding her. Keeley seemed completely unaffected, sitting calmly and watching. When the other girl gave a panicked scream, Vera jumped up and ran towards the sandpit, reaching it in four long strides.
But she wasn't quick enough to reach the little ginger girl, who was now running at full pelt for the edge of the park. Her cries dwindled as she vanished into the trees. Vera was torn between wanting to go after her and staying to protect her own child. But there was nothing to protect her from.
"What happened, Keeley?" she asked breathlessly. "A bee? A wasp?"
Keeley bounced the raptor a few times, making it scale one of the dunes. She turned the dinosaur's head when it reached the top. It was looking in the direction the other girl had fled.
"She didn't like the fairies."
Vera shook her head, confused. "Fairies?"
"Yeah. And they didn't like her."
Something prickled her neck again and Vera waved at the back of her head. Keeley noticed and met her eyes with the same cold gaze as before.
"They don't like you, either."
The matter-of-fact tone and Keeley's dead expression sent a chill through her. It was a few seconds before she found her voice. "Come on," she said. "We're having dinner with Steve." She didn't like the way her voice cracked as she spoke.
Niveau clearly knows storytelling to her fingertips: what to leave out, what to suggest, what to show peripherally, and what to put where in each paragraph: "Bokeh" is a lovely proof of craftsmanship.
* * *
Murder Board by Grady Hendrix
My post about "Murder Board" can be found here.
* * *
Alice's Rebellion by John Langan
Langan's short stories are either sublime or ...not.
For every "On Skua Island" or "Mr. Gaunt" there is a "Technicolor." It's not even that the less satisfying stories are incompetent work. They are simply inert: tiresome reading chores designed for undergraduate anthologies, fodder for experimentally minded comparative literature students not yet trusted with real cadavers.
"Alice's Rebellion" is particularly misbegotten, epitomizing tastelessness achieved when bourgeois liberal electoral moralizing is folded into fiction.
[....]BBC 1 gave her the first warning things were unravelling. During one of their roundtable discussions, a pithy older woman described the new prime minister as Tweedle Dee to the American president's Tweedle Dum. Although Alice had the TV on mostly for background noise while she did her yoga, the comparison caught her attention. A number of political cartoonists picked up on the allusion and for the next several days, the print and online editions of a host of newspapers published cartoons illustrating it. Right away, Alice was struck by the almost preternatural accuracy of the journalist's words, and each drawing to appear reinforced her growing conviction that the Tweedles had not only found their way to this new existence essentially intact, but were prospering within it. She did her best to ignore the icy dread rising within her, to put faith in her co-workers' assurances that everything the PM was promising would be splendid. "He'll take things back to the way they used to be," more than one person said to her.
"Yes," Alice said, "that's what worries me."
* * *
The Mirror House by Jonathan Robbins Leon
"The Mirror House" has a few infelicities in the opening pages ("her soul's passion"; "the man had seemed to appear out of nowhere"), but then the storytelling gets out of its own way. The story quickly blossoms into a strange and unsettling domestic tragedy. Readers like myself who often dream about discovering strange doors or rooms in well-remembered houses will appreciate it.
* * *
The Naughty Step by Stephen Volk
If Volk has written an uninvolving story, I have yet to read it. "The Naughty Step" is how a master handles setting, characterization, foreshadowing, and chronology.
* * *
A Hotel in Germany by Catriona Ward
"A Hotel in Germany" wins the prize for the most Martian horror story I have read this side of CaitlÃn R. Kiernan. I suppose the Potemkin village stylistic flamboyance isn't simply disguising solipsistic dross?
* * *
Branch Line by Paul Finch
"You know what I think? I think what you're really scared of is that stupid ghost story."
"No, I'm not," I responded quickly.
"Course you are!" he sneered, which I seriously didn't like. That this guy could mock me, when I'd been just about the only person who hadn't beaten the crap out of him over the last few years! The only trouble was that he wasn't completely wrong.
"You don't have to be embarrassed about it," he continued, placating again. "The stories are pretty scary. Did you know… about ten years ago, some hippies came up here looking to pitch a camp." His face wrinkled with disgust, no doubt echoing his parents' views about hippies. "There were three blokes and this bird. They wanted somewhere to shag her. That's what they do, hippies. They set camps up, smoke some dope and then gangbang the birds till their tits go red."
I mused on this. After some of the hippy chicks I'd seen around town, that didn't sound like the worst idea.
"Anyway," he said, "everyone told them they shouldn't come up here. The Branch Line doesn't lead anywhere, and it's haunted. But these hippies, they think they know fucking everything. No one hears anything from them for about two days. And then suddenly, the bird turns up at The Fox and Badger… you know, on Vicarage Lane?"
I nodded, intrigued. I wasn't sure there'd been any such thing as hippies ten years earlier, but The Fox and Badger was a real pub, and it was accessible from Loomin Lane, a farm track which ran underneath the Branch Line about a mile ahead of us.
"None of the blokes were ever seen again," Brian added. "But this bird… she was starkers, and her hair had turned snow-white. Her bush too."
"Get out of it!" I snorted.
"It's true!" "Her bush!" "Everyone's heard that story. I'm surprised you haven't."
"What did she say had happened?"
"She didn't. She'd gone totally nuts." Brian was po-faced as he recalled the tragedy. "All they got out of her was this baby babble. She finished up in a loony bin, and no one's had a sensible word out of her since."
I decided that this was a pack of lies. I felt certain I'd have heard about it if some hippy chick had turned up naked at a local pub with her hair and pubes bleached white. Even so, it was a disturbing story. Again, I was aware how heavy the summer heat lay on the deep foliage to either side of us. Much of it had now advanced down the embankments, enclosing us even more, creating a green tunnel-like atmosphere.
"I don't know if I believe that one either, if I'm honest," Brian said. "Sounds a bit lurid."
I nodded, unsure what 'lurid' meant, though it sounded like the right kind of word.
The reader will rightly ask, the branch line, Mr. Finch?
No, it's an even worse branch line.
* * *
After Sundown is a useful register of types of horror being written now. (Normally my reading, outside of whatever Campbell or Reggie Oliver currently publish is confined to the period 1880-1940.)
Jay
24 November 2021
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