Customer Reviews

Four Dark Nights

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What happens when you take four masters of the macabre and ask them to write a horror tale that unfolds under the course of one night? Well, the results is Four Dark Nights, an anthology that takes four of the best names in today's horror field to display their widly twisted imaginations.

The first fourth is a nasty little story called The Circle by Bentley Little. The story plays with time, and with your mind, in amazing ways. You will find a whole neighbourhood blasted into a complete nightmare when a spell is cast of them all. You can't ever predict what's going to happen. The story is also darkly funny. This is the best thing Little has written in a while.

The next two stories, unfortunately, do not display the best of their authors. Christopher Golden's Pyre has its heart in the right place, but its slow-pace and its very predictable payoff take too much away from the story. Here,you find a young woman who wants to resurrect her father to make things right with him again. Tom Piccirilli's Jonah Arose might be too dark original for its own good. The story is a little too depressing and a little to anti-climactic. A pack of dead (or are they?) freak-show attractions are trying to find the narrator's son and rescue him from his demented kidnapper in a world that is eerily similar to ours, but also fundamentally different. Piccirilli's style takes too long to get accustomed to, and the story takes too much time to unfold for you to really fully enjoy yourself.

The heart of this book is written by today's most powerful, most imaginative and most entertaining horror writer. Douglas Clegg has a unique voice that is both strong and magical. And his story The Words does not disappoint. You can always count on Clegg to deliver the goods and he does so again this time around, and then some. In this story, a group of teenage highschoolers find themselves stranded in an abandoned church where an evil force has been resurrected. Clegg has an amazing ability to create characters you care for and want to know more about. The story is scary, fast-paced and very affecting. Douglas Clegg is bound to become one of the most important voice in today's horror field.

These four novellas will provide a great deal of entertainment. Maybe it wasn't fair to pit Golden and Piccirilli against masters like Little and Clegg. But in any case, the book is more than worth its price for its opening and closing stories. The two tales in between are just icing on an already very colorful cake.

Mix four masters of horror, give them free reign with their imaginations, and what do you have? A book worth reading, that's what!

Bentley Littles 'The Circle' starts off the fun. Although different, dark, twisted, and out there, it skids off the road a bit too much at times. I couldn't get into the characters, some of the imagery painted seemed overdone to the point of writing it just to shock the reader, and the ending left me disturbed, not necessarily in a good way.

Christopher Goldens' Pyre was an occupying, fascinating tale about a young girl who, after losing her father, goes over the edge to bring him back for a showdown. The theme was pure bliss, making me want to read more, more, and even more when it was all done with. The characters were convincingly written, multi-dimensional, and lingering. Goldens' writing style is both fierce and strong.

Tom Piccirilli's Jonah Arose is a mixed blessing. The story didn't do it for me, but it was written with a talented hand. The wording was as smooth as butter, the characterization was potent, and the ending strange. It just took a bit too long to get off, I was confused much of the time, since the tale was so 'out there'.

The last offering, Douglas Cleggs' The Words, ties in with Goldens as the winner. Intriguing, different, suspenseful, and creepy, it's a simple tale that holds much more beneath the surface.

In the mood for a good horror anthology? How can you go wrong with four in-depth novellas from these authors? Simple - you can't.

The entries by Golden and Picirrilli are not bad if a trifle long, but the ones by Clegg and Little are outstanding. Little's story in particular, with its "Pulp Fiction"-esque time jiggling, is a standout. Scary and poignant at the same time, as well as being wildly original. This is a superior collection by four of horror's current top talents.

I love the concept of four different novellas by four prominent authors. As a fairly new reader of the horror genre, I appreciated the chance to read four stories in one volume. The first story by Little was all right. It really feels like three short stories, however, not a novella. The first and second parts are told in third person, while the third part is told in first person. I found this to be jarring. Golden's story did nothing for me. I grew bored waiting for some action as his characters wallowed in soap opera drama. I found myself hoping the Viking ghosts would anniliate everyone. Piccirilli has become one of my favorite authors. Yes, he goes over the top with descriptions and details at times, but that's what I like about him. Pic seems to be fascinated with tragic heroes, flawed characters and general freakiness. David Lynch would be a good pick to bring Piccirilli's work to the big screen. Pretty gruesome near the end of the story though. That's what really made it a "horror" story for me. Lastly, the Clegg tale. I was completely drawn in by the outcast protagonists. The back story about books written by someone else years ago (the books Dash reads and becomes enthralled by) seemed so real that I caught myself assuming they were. This story created a powerful and dark ambiance that I did not necessarily enjoy, but there's no denying that it had a lasting effect. Lovecraft never fails to creep me out immensely. Clegg made me feel the same way. Overall, I liked the Clegg and Piccirilli the best and will seek out more novels by both of them.

I guess we have to thank (or blame, as your preference lies) Stephen King for the popularization of the horror novella, legitimizing it as a publishable format with the appearance of his 1982 collection, Different Seasons (and following later with Four Past Midnight). Novellas have yet to achieve mainstream success, per se, but at least people no longer offer up vacant expressions at the mention of the word.

Among the smaller presses, however, the novella has really taken off. Yes, they're still often used simply as the springboard to a longer, more commercially viable work, but in some houses, novellas are just as likely to be published as novels or short story collections or anthologies.

But this lead-in has little or nothing to do with Four Dark Nights, an anthology containing four novellas from authors better known for releasing full-length novels: Bentley Little, Douglas Clegg, Christopher Golden, and Tom Piccirilli -- all popular in their own horror subgenres.

How they come across in their execution of this medium-sized format depends as much on your expectations as their skill. Little's entry, "The Circle," comes first and immediately decides to not play fair -- it is really just three separate short stories tacked together, only two of which are related. Not an auspicious beginning, but then I've often found Little short fiction lacking (see Last Pentacle of the Sun). His combined tales of a feral boy who defecates precious gems, and the strange backyard goings-on of a small town just like your own simply did not hold my interest, though Little's unassuming writing style certainly made it an otherwise easy read.

Luckily, Christopher Golden's "Pyre" is a vast improvement, or I may have just stopped there and not finished Four Dark Nights at all (as you'll discover later, that would have been a pity). A girl, stoically attending the funeral of her mostly absent father, flashes to another time when she and a group of her friends came across an island reportedly formed from the burned remains of dead bodies. This memory launches an idea that will hit her with an uncomfortable truth and change her life forever, if she can only survive the night ahead.

The main problem with "Pyre" is the pacing. Once the central action is presented, Golden and his characters take entirely too long to get where they're headed. I found myself skipping entire paragraphs of description during what were essentially travel scenes (Robert Silverberg shows how to manage this properly in The Book of Skulls). Otherwise, Golden paints a fully developed, especially in the beginning scenes, but mildly implausible portrait of a teenager dealing with confusion and lost opportunity. His history of writing for younger readers is apparent in the obvious respect he has for his characters and their needs.

"Jonah Arose" will please fans of Tom Piccirilli's Southern gothic novels A Choir of Ill Children and November Mourns, and it was the first written of that trilogy of sorts. Piccirilli enjoys focusing on odd characters -- freaks, if you will -- and here he goes right to the source with a look at a real freak show, carnival-style, as a former child preacher and carnival geek goes in search of his kidnapped son. Surrealism is the method here, and Piccirilli plays fast and loose with "reality." We are constantly finding out that things are not what we thought they were and the author never flinches from the most disgusting of images. I often find Piccirilli a difficult read, but always a rewarding one. I just hope I never end up in his world.

Ending the anthology with a bang, Douglas Clegg's "The Words" is a real stunner. In the space of just 85 pages, Clegg creates a mythology, ages it, and sets its destiny in motion via two teenage boys, Dash and Mark, and their perhaps poorly chosen selections of reading materials. Once Dash sets the awful events in motion, only Mark can stop them, but he can't for the life of him remember the words Dash begged him not to forget. Oh, he can remember the names that started it all, but those foreign-sounding words continue to escape him. Clegg creates real tension, even during the flashback scenes used to explain the history and lead up to the present. Using the novella form to its utmost, "The Words" could be told no other way.

Of the four novellas in Four Dark Nights, Little's is the only true dud, but his fans may enjoy his particular style of storytelling anyway. Golden's is surprising (my first work from this author), Piccirilli's is disturbing, and Clegg's is thrilling, the only true page-turner. Horror fans of all stripes will enjoy at least one of the stories told in this anthology, and fans of novellas should especially seek it out, given how rare it is for that form to make it into mass-market paperback. Leisure is just about the only one doing it, often tacking one on to a shorter novel as a bonus to fill out the page count and give the reader more for his money (see Jack Ketchum's Red -- Clegg fans can find novellas in both Nightmare House and The Attraction).

Picked up Four Dark Nights in SF two days ago and rushed through it in two long sittings. Great stories! The novella is a lost art form and all the authors here managed to come up with damn-near classic creations.

Little's was a suspenseful thriller; Golden's a wonderfully evocative and thoughtful fantasy; Piccirilli's return to the Works was a macabre, bizarre, enticing effort; and Clegg's The Words is haunting and creepy with a totally killer ending.

Of the four, Clegg's and Piccirilli's pieces are the stand-outs for me. They're just more weird and eerie, and that's what I'm always after as a horror reader. But all these novellas are first-rate. Definitely nab this book as soon as you can!

Other than varied encounters with the supernatural, there are no obvious common themes running through the novellas offered in FOUR DARK NIGHTS. Apparently given free reign, each author has chosen to pursue themes common to their own work, rather than using this forum to experiment with their fiction. The results, for the most part, are competent entertainments, but each a far cry from the "blood curdling" visions promised by the book's jacket copy.

The collection opens with Bentley Little's disjointed prose experiment "The Circle," perhaps the most confusing novella of 2002. The fractured fairy tale's main focus is on the mayhem that ensues in a suburban neighborhood after two teenagers make a sacrifice at an urban witch woman's backyard shrine. A la Pulp Fiction, however, the story is not told in sequence. It has its moments (a baby who defecates diamonds and other valuable items is a real attention grabber), but readers will likely find their attention wandering at times.

In Christopher Golden's "The Pyre," a young woman is convinced that she will be able to come to terms with her estranged father's death by carting his corpse to an isolated Maine island where she once witnessed a manifestation of the world beyond. The evening, which begins with a grave robbery, ends tragically. An exploration of the bonds between parent and child, "The Pyre" works only if you consciously ignore some of its more implausible elements.

If a walk on the wild side sounds intriguing, Tom Piccirilli's "Jonah Arose" is the story for you. An attempt to paint a densely detailed landscape with words, this piece is bursting at the seams with bizarre images and lengthy digressions. This tale, which probably would have worked better with some of the extraneous detail and exposition stripped away, concerns itself with a man searching for his kidnapped son. The fact that the kidnapper is the child's grandfather adds gravity to the story; the child's condition, revealed at the end of the narrative, will likely haunt many readers.

The final, and most successful of the quartet, is Douglas Clegg's "The Words," an artfully crafted tale of alienation and experimentation that seems to endorse the old adage to choose your friends carefully. Mark and Dash are two teenagers originally thrown together because they are outsiders. They learn to revel in their outsider status, constantly seeking new ways to enhance it. This search leads them to explore "the Nowhere," another aspect of reality. Their attempts to enter and embrace this reality bring them closer to fulfilling their dark destinies.

Though supposedly linked by the fact that the events all take place in a single night, no obvious attempt was made to tie these stories together. Such a device might have added an element of danger or even playfulness to the final output, with the writers working off of each other's ideas and situations. Alas, this conceit was apparently not considered, leading to this somewhat more conservative compilation of
stand-alone stories.

This short novella is about 90 pages long. And believe you me and in can be read by just one sit down. He grabs you from the very beginning of the story.
Mark and Dash are the two main characters and these two boys travel into the darkness of life. And 'THE WORDS' are magic as to entrance you into another world or realm of life.
Classic Clegg!!

Bentley Little, perhaps the best and most underrated author working in horror today, here gives us "The Circle," an amazing bit of writing with a circular conception of time and storytelling. Ostensibly the tale of what happens on a suburban cul de sac one night, it addresses the conformity of suburban life and many of Little's pet thematic concerns. Truly original.
The Clegg novella is also quite good, although Golden's and Piccirilli's contributions are not quite up to par.

As you might expect from a book containing four different stories from four pretty different authors, the results are, as a whole, varied and uneven. The uniting theme that presumably links the stories is a weak and tenuous one, but as it seemed unnecessary to begin with, this does not detract from the book at all.

The first story is "The Circle" by Bentley Little. This story is divided into three somewhat interconnected stories. I say somewhat because the first story appears to have no relation to the second, and is only made reference to in the briefest of observations in the third story. All of the stories take place on the same average block (the titular "Circle") and the last two stories concern themselves with the same events told from different perspectives. What makes this block more or less than average is a bizarre shrine of indeterminate religious origin in the backyard of a college professor. The first story in "The Circle" seemed like it was born out of a "Hey, wouldn't that be weird?" idea but didn't have the substance to be its own story. In any event, I thought it was pretty good despite the aforementioned lack of development... I got the feeling with some more work on the concept it maybe could've been stretched into a longer and more satisfying short story but I think it worked on its own merits as it was as well.

The second story in "The Circle" concerns itself with some of the mysteries of adulthood as viewed by a young boy and his friends, the secrets of a forbidding shrine, of getting what you want and the price you may have to pay, and of that greatest mystery of all for boys... girls. In a chilling sort of way it speaks to the fearful "alienness," anxieties, and sense of mystery many pre-adolescent males feel toward girls and the female body. Working on these fears, anxieties, and sense of mystery it features an inventive and disturbing death given the characters involved, one that Freud would likely have a field day with, but the idea sticks with you after the story is done, and reminded me of a similar death early in Neil Gaiman's "American Gods."

The concluding story of "The Circle" is a little less fantastical and more straightforward "neighborhood under siege" that reminded me somewhat of Richard Laymon's "One Rainy Night" or other works by Little himself. It's good in its own right, but has less of the twisted and the fantastic that makes the other two stories better.

All in all, "The Circle" was a good story, but the uneven way it is connected and the lack of closure to it make it seem like it was written in a hurry, and it could've been more satisfying. It's still quite good though. 7/10.

I wish I could say the same for Christopher Golden's "The Pyre." I did not like this story at all. It was all over the place, with a flashback sequence that felt shoehorned into the main text, and worse yet, totally unbelievable actions and motivations by the two main characters. Even in horror novels where characters don't act as you think they should, in a world with the supernatural, this story struck me as positively ridiculous. A young woman goes to her Dad's funeral. She's angry at him because he never treated her right (oh my, we've been this road once or twice in horror, haven't we?). She sees an old friend of hers and remembers a summer her and her friends spent together in which she saw magic and weird specters on an island. So she convinces her old friend who she hasn't seen in years to help her dig up her father's corpse and drive it a long way to the shore, then float it to the island. Why? Well, that isn't made perfectly clear. Because supernatural things happen there, maybe. And because she needs closure. If you know what ancient red-haired witches have to do with the story, and a sense of where Viking warrior ghosts fit in with bringing the father to the island, then you're already five steps ahead of the author. 3/10.

The third story, by Tom Piccirilli, entitled "Jonah Arose" is the best of the stories in this book. Now, I'm not the biggest Piccirilli fan. I like some of what he writes ("The Night Class") and quite dislike some of his other works ("Hexes"). I've never been among his rather rabid hard-core fan base that thinks everything the man has set to paper is totally above reproach. Personally, I dislike how virtually every single narrator in anything he has ever wrote is essentially the same character, the same voice. That said, I think this story is pretty great. I am a big fan of Piccirilli's fantasy South, the way he portrays the American Deep South might've been in an alternate reality Great Depression era. He jacks up the sordidness, adds in picaresque characters, hopeless freaks, sex-addled, drug-addled losers and weirdoes, with a sort of wry, macabre "Twin Peaks" sense of humor and indulgence in the bizarre. I was a big fan of it in his work "A Choir Of Ill Children" and I'm a big fan of it here.

"Jonah Arose" is about a man searching for his son, kidnapped by his own demented father (the boy's grandfather). The grandfather has taken the boy to a huge complex in Manhattan that is sort of like Richard Matheson's "Hell House" meets a truly demented college, where self-styled insane intellectuals and the damned carry out depraved activities. Accompanying the father, who was a child prodigy with the gift of preaching and laying on hands, and who we learned toured the South with his dad doing so (Revivalist preacher in a tent, the whole nine yards), is a group of former freak show exhibits who give him counsel. As we tour the complex with the narrator, the reader is treated to the bizarre and the baffling, all while layers of the father's, grandfather's, and son's past are peeled back in a gripping fashion. My description doesn't do the story justice, but this is one of the better short stories or novellas I've read in the past few years. 9/10.

The last story in this collection was the disappointing "Words" by Douglas Clegg. I say disappointing, because it starts off interesting, but as it continues, it unfolds in a linear and straightforward way, and ends up being rather bland and unpredictable. There are no twists, no shake-ups, it's just this rather dull here-to-there exposition. It's about two boys, the main character Mark, and his best friend, the oddly precocious and well-read Dash. Dash has some outré reading tastes, and the story takes us quickly through their lives as they grow up from boys into young men. Then, nothing doesn't happen that you wouldn't predict from the set-up. This story is a solid idea that smacks of rushed writing and perfunctory execution. 4/10.

In conclusion, if you're a fan of horror or any of the authors involved, I'd recommend this book. Two of the stories are pretty good, and the other two unimpressive, so it has a better success percentage than many collections of this sort.