Now three terror-filled titles strong, the DARK DELICACIES franchise has become a reliable brand in modern fright fiction, boasting mostly big names. The latest anthology is DARK DELICACIES III: HAUNTED, once more co-edited by Del Howison and Jeff Gelb.
Simon Clark gets the proceeding off to an auspicious start with “Children of the Vortex,” in which a scientific experiment turns men into … well, that’d spoil it, wouldn’t it? Suffice to say, the image won’t soon leave you. Heather Graham takes us to a New Orleans haunted house in “Mist on the Bayou,” while writer/director Eric Red ventures out on to the ghetto streets for “In the Mix,” in which a wannabe rap star learns his rhymes have no reason.
Red isn’t the only Hollywood creative force in the bunch. Joining him are SPIN CITY actor Michael Boatman, whose “The Flinch” enjoys a similar setting, and director Mick Garris, whose “Tyler’s Third Act” demonstrates what happens to one series scribe during a writers’ strike, when he starts up a pay-per-view website in which he’ll amputate his own body parts, live. JEEPERS CREEPERS‘ Victor Salva turns in “The Wandering Unholy,” but that’s the one story I didn’t read, strictly out of protest, and TV’s THE SHINING star Steven Weber provides the introduction.
Richard Christian Matheson’s “How to Edit” documents the slow madness of a writer no longer in fashion, while the “Resurrection Man” of Axelle Carolyn’s story is about a doctor-cum-gravedigger out for a corpse he’s been warned not to touch.
John Connelly’s “The Haunting” is a touching tale about a man who misses his late wife. The theme of loss continues with “The Slow Haunting,” in which John R. Little has the spirit of a dead boy remaining with his identical-twin brother for years … for one sinister purpose. Even more affecting is “Man with a Canvas Bag,” in which Gary A. Braunbeck’s narrator watches in horror as a 5-year-old neighbor girl who’s developmentally disabled is run over by her father.
One of the best endings arrives in Kevin J. Anderson’s “Church Services,” about a fire-and-brimstone traveling preacher; another comes courtesy of Del James’ “Do Sunflowers Have a Fragrance?,” which turns a stalker theme on its head at the last second.
Standing in a field of its own is “Fetch,” a Chuck Palahniuk piece about a tennis ball with a mind of its own. It rubs itself in oil to spell out words on the parking lot, to the story’s befuddled narrator. As with everything Palahniuk writes, you’re guaranteed to have read nothing else quite like it.
But showing them all up is David Morrell, delivering another masterful work in “The Architecture of Snow.” In it, a book editor not ready to retire, but requiring another hit, is sent a manuscript with no return address. He believes it’s the work — hiding under a pseudonym — of a once-famous author with a reclusiveness that rivals J.D. Salinger, and seeks to track him down. I don’t think it remotely qualified as horror, but dammit, is it ever good.
There’s even a poem by Clive Barker for good measure. —Rod Lott
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS SERIES:
• DARK DELICACIES edited by Del Howison and Jeff Gelb
Related posts:
- Q&A with DARK DELICACIES’ Del Howison
- Dark Delicacies
- HWA announces ’05 Stoker nominees
- 7 Books I Didn’t Get a Chance to Read in 2008 (But Wish I Had)
- Dark Distortions
