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The Inner City by Karen Heuler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Heuler’s collection gathers fifteen prime examples of her hallmark surrealist stories. Each one takes a recognizable character in a recognizable setting but follows the situation through to an absurd, dreamlike extreme. There’s a lot of sly humor to be found in these stories — a woman buys a fish at the supermarket only to discover it’s still alive and can grant her three wishes; an officer worker notices she’s gone bald and that a colleague who’s after her job has come to work wearing her hair; a vegetarian succeeds in bringing supermarket meat back to life, Frankenstein-style — but there’s a darker side to them, too, one that often borders on the horrific. My favorite of the bunch, “Thick Water,” is a remarkably sinister tale of suspicion and paranoia among human explorers on an alien world, in which all of the explorers but one are transforming. It’s an extraordinary piece of work, but then so are all the stories collected here. THE INNER CITY is a dark and delightful treat for anyone who likes their fiction engagingly weird and deeply human.

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Man with No Name by Laird Barron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This slim volume contains two exemplary tales by the inimitable Laird Barron. The first, the novella “Man with No Name,” is an excellent reminder that nobody captures the mystery and disorientation of being caught up in unknowable supernatural forces like Barron does. Hints of a much larger and more terrifying backstory pepper this tale of a Yakuza enforcer, a popular professional wrestler, and a terrifying excursion into the liminal realm between the worlds of the natural and the supernatural. It’s an amazing piece of work, filled with darkness and disquiet.

The second story, “Blood & Stardust,” is somewhat lighter in tone, an astute and often amusing take on mad scientists and their creations. Barron shows a deep sense of compassion for his narrator, despite her many crimes, and infuses the story with his trademark hints of a wider and scarier world than we’re aware of.

Both stories provide ample evidence of why Barron is widely considered one of the finest horror authors working today. This small, two-story collection is a must-own for Barron fans, and not a bad place to start for those looking to experience his ghastly and arcane cosmos for the first time.

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Aickman’s Heirs by Simon Strantzas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Robert Aickman’s stories were all about the irrational and the unknowable. The authors in this homage anthology put those same qualities to good use in fifteen intriguing tales of the unknowable’s intrusion upon seemingly normal lives.

The writing is uniformly beautiful, although this reader will admit to finding a few of the stories frustratingly oblique. Regardless, there were many standouts for me, including Brian Evenson’s “Seaside Town,” which makes great use of the dream or nighttime logic that Aickmann reveled in; Michael Cisco’s “Infestations,” a surreal meditation on identity, voyeurism, loss, and insanity; John Langan’s “Underground Economy,” which mixes exotic dancers and insect mating rituals; Malcolm Devlin’s “Two Brothers,” which I found to be one of the more straightforward horror tales in the anthology, and as a result one of the most effective; Nina Allan’s remarkable novelette “A Change of Scene,” which does a great job of keeping the reader off-balance; and my favorite of all of them, Nadia Bulkin’s “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” in which our narrator discovers she’s part of a terrible secret reflected in a children’s game she used to play.

Bulkin’s story is outstanding and well worthy of the Shirley Jackson Award nomination it received. As is AICKMAN’S HEIRS, which won the Shirley Jackson Award in the anthology category. Editor Simon Strantzas has created something special with this anthology, a rich compendium of extraordinary and strange tales that I hope will find the many readers it deserves.

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Disappearance at Devil’s Rock by Paul Tremblay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Another masterful novel by one of my favorite contemporary authors! Tremblay’s suspenseful suburban Gothic about a young boy’s sudden, unsolved disappearance reminds me of the classic film PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, as well as the recent film LAKE MUNGO and the better parts of Tana French’s uneven disappearance mystery IN THE WOODS. The plot is actually more complex than in Tremblay’s previous novel, A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS, and admirably straddles the line between crime novel and ghost story. But as usual it’s Tremblay’s richly drawn characters who make the novel so indelible. We care deeply about Elizabeth Sanderson and her young daughter Kate as they deal with all the questions, doubts, and insecurities that come in the wake of Tommy’s disappearance. Tremblay’s deep compassion for his characters shows as he skillfully doles out clues to Tommy’s fate. Nothing in this novel plays out the way you think it will, and I mean that in the best way possible. Every new Tremblay novel feels like a gift. I can’t wait to read what he writes next!

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