Customer Reviews

Phantom

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

 

 

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.