With SUPERNATURAL NOIR, prolific and award-winning editor Ellen Datlow set out to find stories that would combine the characteristics of her two favorite types of genre literature. So, per her brief introduction to this original anthology, she put the word out for “smart, edgy, complex, harder-than-nails stories of the supernatural with at least a few of the trademarks of noir.”
The challenge is a lot harder than it seems. Noir, as Datlow herself notes, is “an attitude” — that is, a mostly interior-oriented, cynical and pessimistic view of the world, most often incorporated in crime fiction. Stories of the supernatural, both horror and fantasy, are mostly about external forces — an extraordinary being, power or imagined world.
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Each year, the Horror Writers’ Association presents the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement for horror and dark fiction, named after the author of the quintessential vampire novel.
No, not TWILIGHT.
If you don’t know that Bram Stoker was the author of DRACULA, then chances are you stumbled upon this column by accident, and the rest will be meaningless to you. I’ll wait while you hit the back key …
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Pity the poor vampire as he/she (it?) tries to hang onto its dominance as the go-to monster in this age of zombie apocalypses. The vampire has undergone a softening of its original concept, from the homoeroticism of Anne Rice’s novels to the recent romanticized figure of teen and tween literature (if you can call it that).
Tell me: Who thought sparkly vampires was a good idea? When did they become the modern-day Tinkerbells? Anyway …
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Zombies, zombies, everywhere! Long a staple of horror movies, the living dead have recently lumbered their way to prominence on TV, in comics, novels and dozens of story collections. So why then should we pay particular attention to a novel with the innocuous title DEAD OF NIGHT? Because it’s from Jonathan Maberry, one of the most inventive and reliably entertaining authors currently mining the undead trend.
Desdemona “Dez” Fox, and partner JT Hammond, police officers in the small town of Stebbins County, Penn., are called one morning to the grounds of Hartnup’s Transition Estate, a local mortuary, for a suspected break-in. They find two horribly mutilated corpses, and evidence of a third gone missing. As Dez and JT inspect the grounds, the two bodies suddenly come back to life and attack them.
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If you haven’t read THE STRAIN and THE FALL, I’m offering up a spoiler alert here: Spoiler alert!
Jesus, I hate people who complain about spoilers. Anyway, if you have read the above two installments of Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s vampire trilogy, you’ve got to be on board for THE NIGHT ETERNAL, right?
I mean, the end of book two was some pretty hardcore apocalyptic shit. Luckily, the third and final book provides a meaty examination of the new, vampire-dominated Earth, with lots of explanation of how things work now, two years after the events of THE FALL.
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