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?
Phantom
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Book Description
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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.... Read more ›
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.... Read more ›
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