Phantom [Paperback]

Paul Tremblay (Editor), Sean Wallace (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 16, 2009

No ax murderers hunting sexy teens . . . no brutal torture for torture's sake . . . because PHANTOM goes beyond the scare: Paul Tremblay and Sean Wallace have collected fourteen stories by today's most thoughtful writers of horror, each asking the questions beyond what is frightening? This is just the beginning, however, with stories from Steve Rasnic Tem, Lavie Tidhar, F. Brett Cox, Stephen Graham Jones, Steve Berman, Nick Mamatas, Michael Cisco, among other fresh voices in horror. From paranoid gold prospectors to lonely curators, Satan-worshipping Long Island teens, metaphysics-obsessed television reporters, and to Peter and Olivia and their devastating final choices detailed in the last pages of this anthology, the fourteen stories of Phantom present their horrors differently, but they all ask: How does anyone live through this?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ghosts, disaffected wives, deserted towns, obsessive journalists and children who never existed haunt the pages of this stunning, elegant and frightful anthology of literary horror assembled by Stoker nominee Tremblay and World Fantasy Award–winning Wallace (Bandersnatch). There are no chainsaw massacres in these 14 exquisite tales, which range from Steve Berman's hilarious Kafkaesque Kinder, about an infestation of German children, to Stephen Graham Jones's The Ones Who Got Away, a riveting account of a kidnapping gone wrong. The most outstanding piece is Lavie Tidhar's Set Down This, a devastating story of YouTube videos, the Iraq War and the unknown lives on both sides of the conflict. Only a few weak links, like Geoffrey H. Goodwin's lusty but clichéd Jonquils Bloom, mar this deliciously creepy book of horrors that prove all the more terrifying for their everyday nature. (Jan.)
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From Booklist

With the glut of vampire novels and slasher flicks currently saturating the horror genre, it’s easy to overlook the still healthy demand for loftier ways of scaring people. While its intended audience may be small for now, this slender volume of highbrow horror stories offers superlative craftsmanship without sacrificing the indispensable chills. The assembled authors, whose publishing credits range from Fantasy Magazine to the New England Quarterly, have in common twisted imaginations and respect for literary distinction. In Steve Eller’s “The End of Everything,” a killer is astounded and relieved to discover that the post-apocalyptic zombies roaming the streets aren’t the least interested in feasting on him. Two teenaged kidnappers in Stephen Graham Jones’ “The Ones Who Got Away” get more than they bargained for when they realize their intended victim is the child of a machete-wielding judge. More than a few tales here stop abruptly in unsatisfying endings, but one can’t fault their creators’ abilities to startle the reader with unusual premises and unsettling imagery. --Carl Hays

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Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Prime Books (November 16, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1607012006
• ISBN-13: 978-1607012009
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,476,263 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Horror of Survival, December 29, 2009

By 

Jesse Bullington (Colorado) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Phantom (Paperback)

Determining how to rate an anthology such as this is tricky, as I didn't feel all of the stories earned 5, or even 4 stars, but looking over the table of contents again I feel the anthology as a whole deserves a five star rating. The editors Wallace and Tremblay have done a bang-up job assembling an array of stories that are tied together by an almost ephemeral theme, one which becomes more and more obvious the deeper one gets into the anthology. The tagline of "going beyond the scare" describes the antho rather well as a whole, and it's an underused concept--too often horror is the lead up to violence and the violence itself, whereas here violence is sometimes the catalyst, sometimes the conclusion, but never the entirety of the tale.

I didn't love all the stories in the anthology, and a few I didn't even like, but that's the way with most any anthology and should hardly be counted against the work as a whole, which is by and large excellent. In a reversal of what I usually go in for a lot of my favorite stories were the ones where the supernatural was utterly absent--the horror of the mundane world. Nick Mamatas's "A Stain on the Stone," Karen Heuler's "After Images," Stephen Graham Jones's "The Ones That Got Away," and Vylar Kaftan's "What President Polk Said" were stand outs in this regard.

The stories that employed more fantastic elements were arranged in the table of contents so that the mundane and the supernatural could bleed into one another, and overall the arrangement of stories was quite effective. "The Cabinet Child" by Steve Rasnic Tem, "Kinder" by Steve Berman, and "Invasive species" by Carrie Laben were my favorite stories that could be considered to contain something a step beyond the real world horror of the previously mentioned reality-bound stories, but part of the appeal to these stories is that the fantastic is used in conjunction with a strong human heart instead of being the sort of monster mash you might find in a lesser anthology. Not that I'm opposed to a good monster mash, mind, this just isn't that sort of anthology. This is more of a contemplative, brooding collection, and one that succeeds at capturing a more subtle variety of horror than is commonly found in the genre.