Finally, I can think of Harlan County, Ky., and not think of that depressing union documentary. Thanks to Apex Publications’ HARLAN COUNTY HORRORS, I instead can associate the mining town with aliens, zombies, demons, witches, evil spirits and outright lunacy.
Twelve short stories and one essay comprise this anthology, beginning with Debbie Kuhn’s oddly touching “The Power of Moonlight,” which proves that true love never dies. Well, okay, it may die, but it comes back from the dead, if you know what I mean and I think that you do.
Due to its episodic structure, Geoffrey Girard’s chilling “Psychomania” feels epic in length, but resides in a mere 12 pages. The folks at Harlan Baptist Church get an alien visitor — literally — in “Yellow Warblers” by Jason Sizemore, and a relic causes serious problems in Robby Sparks’ “Spirit Fire.” With a wickedly terrific ending, it’s a story hampered only by its insistence to have its characters speak in a distracting drawl: “I swar, by all that’s in me, thar’ll be a reckonin’!”
Quick but effective, Ronald Kelly’s “The Thing at the Side of the Road” plays like a B-movie gem, offering just what its title promises. In “Inheritance,” Stephanie Lenz proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that tchotchkes from Vietnam should never cross the Kentucky state line.
Although not batting a thousand, HARLAN COUNTY HORRORS hits enough — and some of it hard — to make it memorable. It’s a unique idea for a fiction collection to set all its contents in a locale so precise; yes, Akashic targets places with its city-based NOIR series, but those whereabouts tend toward the iconic and capitals — by contrast, Harlan County is a small, blue-collar town with a population around 33,000. In other words, one of the least likely places around which to center a book of site-specific stories.
But this is horror — a genre that thrives on surprises. With major publishers having abandoned short-story collections almost completely, it’s up to the little guys to keep them alive. In HARLAN COUNTY HORRORS, Apex has issued a well-designed one with an intriguing theme and contents that pay it off. —Rod Lott
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Thanks.