Hanover Square Press / July 2020
Review by: Vince A. Liaguno

There’s nothing more dangerous than a small town with big secrets. For Joel Whitley, the marvelously flawed protagonist in John Fram’s equally marvelous literary debut The Bright Lands, those secrets take a personal toll that catapults him through a propulsive, twisty sequence of events. After the disappearance of his younger brother—star quarterback of the hometown football team—forces him to return to the conservative Texas town from which he was shamefully driven a decade prior, Joel teams up with Sheriff’s Deputy Starsha Clark, for whom Joel’s return brings up her own uneasy memories of her brother who also disappeared years earlier. As the two dig deeper into the secrets running beneath the grounds of Bentley—literally and figuratively—the novel skillfully ratchets up a degree of tension that belies the fact that this is a debut novel. What follows is a tightly-written, compelling novel that’s part Varsity Blues, part <insert name of favorite Stephen King small-town evil novel here>, mixed with the sexy melodrama of an early Christopher Rice novel.

Nightmarish dreams of the titular locale and eerie whispers transition Fram’s novel from police procedural to supernatural thriller that remains anchored in the reality of human deception, addiction, homophobia, and murder. The paranormal elements—at times—seem unnecessary and leave one wondering if they were wholly essential to telling the story. For this reviewer, Fram is at his strongest when he’s shining an uncomfortable light on the generational damage and sadness of small-town high school athletics, in which testosterone-fueled adolescent boys achieve a quasi-celebrity status that never translates into adulthood for most. In Fram’s capable hands, the insularity of these dead-end towns that nurture dead-end futures for the sake of small-town pride in the athletic prowess of its young men is the real achievement here, one that imbues The Bright Lands with a pervasive sense of melancholy because we know people like these characters—narrow-focused boys who pin their futures on longshot dreams of the big leagues who become disillusioned grown men who relive their glory days in a looping reel in between menial jobs that don’t afford them one iota of the life they once dreamt of, starry-eyed and confident in their youth.

Fram perfectly captures small town ennui while illustrating how deep the darkness of corruption can run beneath the surface of Mayberry ordinariness. The theme of toxic masculinity weighs heavily here, and Fram does a respectable job exploring this modern societal problem from the perspectives of several characters, which allows him to do so with scope and breadth. There’s also a perceptive examination of the power of generational fraternity and how that power is fueled by domineering men for whom authority, influence, privilege, and entitlement can converge into a potent—and oppressive—force.

The sheer hedonism of the novel’s action-packed climax may be jarring for some. I’m hard-pressed to remember a debut novel that’s as unabashed in its queerness since Christopher Rice’s literary bow with A Density of Souls back in 2000. Fram lets loose here in the third act and shows the ugliness of sexual repression in its many forms—including adult authority figures using money, drugs, and coercion to lure underage male victims.

John Fram’s The Bright Lands is an impressive debut novel, a first-rate work of southern gothic fiction that never lets its socio-political underpinnings overwhelm the storytelling at its heart. The central mystery at its core is the book’s driving force for an overall engaging cast of characters, and Fram nails the sweltering, dust-bowl Texas setting so well that the town of Bentley becomes a key character in and of itself. An enthralling thriller with horror overtones, The Bright Lands is a harbinger of great things to come from a promising new voice in literary fiction.

Purchase The Bright Lands by John Fram here.

Lanternfish Press / October 2020
Reviewed by: Vince A. Liaguno

Literary debuts come in all sizes—some arrive with big and buzzy fanfare; others slip in quietly, unobtrusively. Although Matthew Vesely’s Elegy for the Undead falls squarely into the latter category, this stunning novella marks the introduction of a voice worth keeping an ear out for. What makes Elegy even more impressive is that it takes a weary pop culture phenomenon—zombies—and makes every one of the subgenre’s tropes seem fresh when backlit against the heartrending humanity of Vesely’s story.

Jude and Lyle, the protagonists at the heart of Elegy, are just your typical queer newlyweds juggling life, love, and careers when a zombie apocalypse upends life as they know it. Told in alternating flashbacks and time jumps from both Jude’s and Lyle’s points of view, we follow the couple through their circumspect courtship to marriage, from settling down and establishing a home in suburbia to navigating flesh-eating neighbors. One of them is bitten, infecting him with a virus that causes violent episodes and a gradual physical and mental deterioration. Although antivirals slow the progression of this newly-emergent disease, both men understand the progression of the illness and how it ends—death followed by reanimation followed by compassionate euthanasia.

Vesely’s story is masterfully paced, with the flashback and time-jump narrative devices used with a careful precision that builds tension, suspense, and emotional investment in his characters. Mini cliffhangers abound, propelling readers to turn pages quicker and quicker to find out what happened and what’s next. Although Elegy is a lean 171 pages of storytelling, the reader never feels rushed or cheated; Vesely tells the couple’s story completely.

The zombie infection in Elegy is, quite clearly from the outset, an allegorical stand-in for any number of degenerative diseases that robs its victim of their personhood—Alzheimer’s and ALS spring most immediately to mind—but Vesely’s tale never suffers for that obviousness; conversely, the universal familiarity of grappling with a malignancy that advances toward an inevitable end lends an emotional gravitas to the usual once bitten/twice dead body count apathy of zombie tales. Think about why Train to Busan or the earlier episodes of The Walking Dead resonated so deeply with audiences and stood out in an otherwise one-note subgenre and you’ll understand why Vesely’s tale is so special.

In Elegy for the Undead, newcomer Matthew Vesely has crafted a deceptively simple tale of love in the age of zombies; but look closer and you’ll find a beautifully nuanced tale of the complexities of human connection and an affecting rumination on anticipated grief. No surprise either that Elegy comes from Lanternfish Press, an impressive boutique publisher of other compelling, strange literary birds. It’s a novella of breathtaking achievement that one could easily imagine being adapted for the screen by an equally gifted visual storyteller like Osgood (I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, The Blackcoat’s Daughter) Perkins or Carter (Jamie Marks is Dead, Bugcrush) Smith and then becoming a breakout hit on the film festival circuit.

Purchase Elegy for the Undead by Matthew Vesely here.

Sinister Grin Press / March 2017
Reviewed by: Vince A. Liaguno

With A Soundless Dawn, Dustin LaValley has crafted a lean collection of 41 flash fiction and short stories that defies classification—a blend of horror and neo-noir and literary fiction that’s as eclectic and wholly original as anything you’re likely to find on bookstore shelves. LaValley masterfully plays with story structure, allowing him to toy with readers’ expectations. The offerings in A Soundless Dawn never let the reader commit, like a ride through the dark that turns sharp left when you expect to go right—a literary Space Mountain.

The collection has a discernible rhythm—like literary music set to a beat of two micro-shorts punctuated by a proper short story. Some of the tales here have a vague whiff of autobiography; others are relentlessly bleak, with an air of unrequitedness being one of the more pervasive themes. LaValley executes a cunning examination of the human condition—sometimes in a mere sentence or two—exploring the tolls of homelessness, drugs, lust, displacement, insomnia, and violence on the soul. Most of the stories in A Soundless Dawn eschew focus on the outward effects of these things and concentrate on what they do to the essence of a person. And therein lies the strength of LaValley’s deceptively slim collection.

The best tales in A Soundless Dawn are disorienting (“Picture-in-Picture,” “Awake and Dreaming”) or the superb “Used,” in which the unnamed narrator’s heightened olfactory senses tell the story of a used book’s former owner.

“Sand Bucket”—which is both jarringly out of place here and perfectly suited for this collection—is a gorgeous short story about a little boy’s imaginary friend that manifests in a bucket of sand. It’s a heartbreaker that will sucker punch you with its emotion as it explores, first, the anguish of parents trying to cope with a child’s mental illness and, then, their acceptance of it. It’s a heartrending, elegiac tale about unconditional love and the standout of the collection.

In his introduction to A Soundless Dawn, Edward Lee posits that formula in genre fiction equals familiarity; consequently, familiarity equals trust. Readers will find little formula here, even less familiarity, and almost nothing tangible to trust in LaValley’s capable hands. Like other contemporary literary outlaws—I’m thinking of Dennis Cooper’s uncomfortable blend of sex and violence or Joyce Carol Oate’s rejection of the linear narrative or Stephen Graham Jones’ masterful blending of disparate structures and experimental forms—LaValley earns the title handily with this illuminating and genuinely transgressive collection.

Purchase A Soundless Dawn by Dustin LaValley here.

Random House / January 2019
Reviewed by: Vince A. Liaguno

Lodge’s debut thriller—the first of a proposed series—centers on an ill-fated camping trip and its shattering aftermath. It’s a hot summer night in July of 1983 when seven high school friends go deep into the woods camping in southeast England. There’s booze and drugs, some sexual hook-ups and at least one unrequited love. By morning, one of the group—Aurora Jackson, the youngest—has disappeared without a trace. Despite the teens calling for help and a massive and exhaustive police-led volunteer search—complete with cadaver dogs—the young girl is never found.

Flash forward thirty-odd years later and a random discovery leads to Aurora’s bones being unearthed in a secret concave hideaway only the six friends knew about near the campsite where she disappeared. Enter Detective Chief Inspector Jonah Sheens, who was an upstart policeman when Aurora first went missing. He’s assigned to the cold case-now-warmed with his investigative team that includes Detective Constable Juliette Hanson, the newest member of the team, Detective Sergeant Domnall O’Malley, and Detective Constable Ben Lightman. Adding to the intrigue is the fact that Sheens knew the teens, at least peripherally, from high school. Suffice to say that secrets abound as DCI Sheens and his team wade through a convoluted web of misdirection and a decades-old conspiracy of silence amongst the group of friends, now marvelously flawed adults.

Lodge chooses to tell her tale from the perspectives of multiple characters along the way, but the narrative is primarily arranged in alternating chapters between the present-day investigation as seen through the eyes of Sheen and that fateful first night in the woods told through Aurora’s point of view. Lodge does an excellent job of presenting her modest suspect list as a series of engrossing character studies of the surviving teens—each grappling with the psychological aftereffects of that fateful night in light of its present-day outcome, long-suppressed memories that have proven unreliable with the passage of time, and petty resentments not uncommon in groups of lifelong friends.  

Fans of police procedurals will delight in the abundance of suspect interrogations, as well as the interactions and debriefings amongst Sheens’ team that provide a glimpse into the inner workings of such law enforcement machines. Lodge’s plotting is intricate and, more importantly for mystery lovers, holds together in terms of logic even through the requisite twists and turns and red herrings, all of which are competently executed here. She misfires—albeit slightly—with two subplots involving Sheens and Hanson that feel wholly unnecessary to the larger narrative but one should take this minor criticism with a grain of salt in consideration that She Lies In Wait is a series launch.

She Lies In Wait will likely appeal to both thriller fans and those mystery lovers who relish a worthwhile whodunit. Lodge creates a sympathetic—tragic, even—victim in Aurora Jackson and readers may (surprisingly) find themselves welling up with emotion in the novel’s beautifully executed closing paragraphs. DCI Sheens and crew are likable and interesting enough—Lightman, especially, leaves me wanting to know more—to warrant further adventure, even if Lodge’s suspects may not elicit much sympathy from readers over the course of this first murder mystery.

Purchase She Lies In Wait by Gytha Lodge.

Pamela Dorman Books / August 2018
Reviewed by: Vince A. Liaguno

Any mystery writer who takes on the locked-room mystery formula of Agatha Christie rolls the dice. Sometimes, the roll gives them a winner—oftentimes not. So when Shari Lapena—fresh off the success of two well-received breakout novels, The Couple Next Door and A Stranger in the House—takes on an obvious homage to Christie’s classic And Then There Were None, you find yourself holding your breath as the dice roll down the table.

Her classic set-up is as comforting as it is familiar—ten guests arrive at a quaint (and quite isolated) mountain lodge in the Catskills where a crippling weather event (here a blizzard and ice storm) cuts them off from the outside world. Someone dies in what first appears to be an accident. Then someone else dies in what is decidedly not an accident and the stranded guests—tended to by a father-son team of innkeepers—realize that a murderer walks among them. Misplaced suspicions and character reveals stoke the fires of paranoia. The bodies continue to pile up until the power is restored and the local law enforcement can be called in just in time for the drawing room denouement.

Lapena—like myriad writers before her—proves that a dozen cooks can use the same ingredients and follow the same recipe but still end up with twelve slightly different dishes. While she ably sets the scene in An Unwanted Guest, her execution veers off somewhere in the second act, all but derailing the third. Her ensemble of weekend guests are distinguishable enough from one another, but none of them truly stands out. This makes the key hook for readers—a character with whom they sympathize and can root for—lacking here. With no one to cheer on, readers may find themselves bumbling around as aimlessly as her characters do once the requisite power fail kills the lights.

With An Unwanted Guest, it almost seems like Lapena wanted to write a serious locked-room mystery but then changed her mind midway through and decided she should go the thriller route. As such, her pacing is on-point, with shorter passages told from various characters’ points of view lending momentum and allowing her to slow things down or quicken the pace when she needs to. She ably layers in a red herring or two that momentarily diverts the reader’s attention, but ultimately she misses the mystery mark by failing to make it possible for readers to solve the mystery themselves. The third-act reveal seems rushed, with motive and backstory dumped out unceremoniously and as fast as the killer is handcuffed. One assumes this is to make way for the big twist—something of a “must” now in psychological thrillers and quickly becoming a trope in and of itself—but even that the reader will see coming from a mile away.

An Unwanted Guest is like a beautifully formatted essay that, ultimately, makes no point. Taken strictly as an homage to Christie’s classics, it works better—but even then only slightly because of its mediocre third act. You’ll find yourself happy you made it for the party but ultimately disappointed that you didn’t get out before the roads got too bad to leave.

Purchase An Unwanted Guest by Shari Lapena.

Camphor Press / May 2018
Reviewed by: Vince A. Liaguno

Spooky theatrics, culturally-infused superstitions, conspiratorial wartime collaborations, and even a spectral tribunal fuse to create a ghost story that’s at once as comfortingly familiar as it is wholly unique in Marshall Moore’s first-rate Inhospitable.

Hotel manager Lena Haze leads a comfortably middle-class American life with Marcus, her attorney husband, in North Carolina. When Marcus receives an unexpected inheritance windfall—a mixed-use building in a desirable part of Hong Kong—from an uncle he’s never met, it comes with a caveat: It cannot be sold. With Lena’s background in the hospitality industry, the Haze’s decide to open their dream upscale boutique hotel. Seeking substantial investment for renovations from telecom and real estate tycoons Paul and Jessica Lo, Lena travels ahead to Wan Chai while Marcus closes out their life back in the States. Alone and adjusting to the cultural shock of life in China as a stranger in a strange land, Lena experiences a supernatural encounter—not her first—when she witnesses the seeming suicides of two young people at the outset of the novel. As in any good ghost story, there are no coincidences and the Haze’s soon find themselves in a life and death struggle against a vengeful ghostly presence enacting a decades-old blood feud as their hotel—The Olympia—inches closer to opening.

Moore does an excellent job creating a three-dimensional heroine in Lena, and his supporting cast are no lesser drawn. Of note are Claire, Lena’s newfound fifty-ish friend—herself an expatriate—whose voice is like “rock salt and honey” and who possesses a genteel southern-style sarcasm that drips with a politeness that does little to temper her candor. Isaac, the Lo’s gay son just back from graduate school abroad, is also well-drawn, serving as Lena’s sassy sidekick as the paranormal goings-on ratchet up.

Moore—himself an American expat living in Hong Kong—uses the city not as mere backdrop here but as an essential character. Of particular merit is a scene in which Lena and Isaac traverse into a sketchy area on the outskirts of the city to get more information on the background of their malevolent spirit-villain. Moore uses the idea of the crowd closing in on Lena very effectively, likening it to suffocation. I (like many readers perhaps), having never been to Hong Kong or one of the larger Asian cities, have images from film and TV of throngs of people moving in synchronized determination and Moore deftly captures what it must be like to be caught up in the midst of a moving crowd that large—disoriented, claustrophobic, suffocated. The scene is quite effective and resonates in a visceral way.

Although Inhospitable is sufficiently dark—relentlessly so at times—the novel is not without some wonderful interjections of humor in its scary moments. Consider this brilliantly funny passage from a flashback scene in which a young housekeeper at the North Carolinian hotel Lena formerly managed is fresh from an encounter with the establishment’s resident ghost:

"The next day, one of the housekeepers ran screaming out of 217, having seen the armchair slide across the floor, gaining speed as it approached her. She jumped out of the way at the last second, so it only grazed her, leaving a bruise instead of a fracture. The girl screamed herself hoarse, running down the hall crying and calling out to Jesus for mercy and flailing her hands about and somehow not falling down. Lena heard the ruckus from her office and went running, as did most of the front-line staff. Carlita took the girl (whose name slipped Lena’s mind amid all the uproar) downstairs for tea; Lena and Don reassured alarmed guests that no one had been murdered. 

“She just got some bad news,” Lena explained over and over. With older guests, she added the compulsory Southern punctuation: “Bless her heart.”

To a one, they murmured the expected platitudes: “How awful” and “Poor thing” and the like. Lena spent the next twenty minutes piecing together the story. Danae, the seeming target of the armchair, twice interrupted her account of what had happened by breaking into fresh sobs and entreaties to Jesus. Our Lord and Saviour did not put in an appearance, but pharmaceuticals did: Carlita gave Danae half a Xanax and said Christ would want her to relax.

I am so giving you a raise, Lena thought."

With Inhospitable, Moore successfully challenges readers’ longstanding notions of ghosts in a genuinely unnerving tale of the most haunted hotel since King’s Overlook. His deft handling of multi-dimensional, multi-cultural characters creates the requisite emotional investment, while his judicial layering of rich historical detail in between the scares gives added context to this well-plotted, superbly executed work of speculative fiction.

Purchase Inhospitable by Marshall Moore. 

Anchor Books / October 2017
Reviewed by: Vince A. Liaguno

Haunted Nights would seem to have the perfect horror pedigree: It’s co-edited by both the world’s preeminent genre anthologist and the leading authority on Halloween; it’s put together by the world’s largest professional association of horror writers; it’s published by Blumhouse Books, the publishing arm of megawatt horror producer Jason Blum; it boasts a stellar lineup of contributing authors; and it’s got the quintessential horror theme—Halloween.

In her introduction, Morton presents a crash course on the origins—both real-life and literary—of Halloween and makes a compelling case for why the holiday remains so thematically relevant and effective in speculative fiction:

“Halloween, with its roots in a night that lifts the veil between our world and the next, is broad enough to hold horror tropes like ghosts, witches, and shape-shifters, but it also has its own specific icons, like ‘Stingy Jack,’ the blacksmith who outwits the devil but is finally forced to wander the earth forever with his way lit only by a glowing hell ember carried in a carved pumpkin (or turnip), the jack-o’-lantern, in other words. Halloween’s universal appeal—we are all interested in death, aren’t we? —makes it work in both isolated, rural settings and densely packed urban locales. It has a rich history and seems poised to extend into a long and interesting future.”

Morton, sharing co-editing duties with Ellen Datlow, goes on to present sixteen stories cast against their broad Halloween backdrop to demonstrate the holiday’s thematic breadth, depth, and versatility.

This literary Halloween party ably kicks off with Seanan McGuire’s beautifully titled “With Graveyard Weeds and Wolfsbane Seeds.” Her Oregon-set tale tells the story of a lonely ghost girl haunting the halls of her eerily preserved childhood manse in search of a playmate. A group of would-be teenage vandals presents a fine selection from which to choose.

Stephen Graham Jones, always a bankable anthology talent, offers “Dirtmouth.” The first-person confessional format is a smart narrative choice for this story of a grieving widower who—with infant twins in tow for a month-long retreat at a snowy mountain cabin—encounters the simultaneously comforting and discomfiting manifestation of his missing and presumed-dead wife. Jones ably crafts an unreliable narrator who leaves the reader to fill in the blanks and draw conclusions at tale’s end.

Jonathan Maberry presents a mouth-watering revenge tale in “A Small Taste of the Old Country.” An Austrian baker invites two questionably Argentinian men to dine in celebration of Seelenwoche, or All Souls’ week. Maberry’s encyclopedic knowledge of world breads alone is so impressive and immersive that readers will forgive the rather obviousness of the story’s eventual revelations. Try the soul cakes while you’re there!

Ghost stories are the Halloween currency at a dejected roadside tavern in Joanna Parypinski’s atmospheric, if somewhat rushed, “Wick’s End.” Parypinski packs a lot into her modest word count and the result feels like plucking one of those tasty but ultimately disappointingly small sample-size candies out of an otherwise stuffed trick-or-treat bag.

In “The Seventeen-Year Itch,” Garth Nix starts off strong with this escalating tale of a mental hospital and a strange old patient with a nagging itch. Like Parypinski’s tale before it, the reader is left wishing Nix had been sent back by the editors to fill in just a few more of the blanks by story’s end. Instead, like the titular itch, there’s just a nagging sense of missing origin.

A downtrodden single mother of two trying to scrape by on public assistance and living in a bad part of town—especially on Devil’s Night—fears for the man her teenage son will turn out to be in Kate Jonez’s effectively tragic “A Flicker of Light on Devil’s Night.”

Jeffrey Ford dazzles with “Witch Hazel,” a spellbinding tale of 19^th-century terror set in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. When twin sisters go on a murderous rampage during a Halloween celebration, the local doctor quickly diagnoses a brain parasite, which he more atmospherically characterizes as “something that has crawled out of the dark heart of the barrens, centuries old.” Dubbed “the suspicions” for “the paranoia it engendered with a fury that took over the mind,” the disease isn’t just a matter of biology and chemistry as the doctor and some of the townsfolk soon find out. Ford nails the feelings of superstitions passed down over generations and the folklore leanings of the story are strong and beautifully executed.

Kelley Armstrong grabs readers in the opening paragraphs of “Nos Galan Gaeaf” and doesn’t let go until the last sentence. She captures both the intricacies of Welsh customs and obsessive-compulsive disorder with a disarming deftness that makes this one of the collection’s standout tales. Bullied teen Lance—or Loser Lance to his detractors—has what appears to be a foolproof plan to rid himself of the girl he’s convinced has bewitched him under cover of his town’s titular calendar designation (also known as Spirit Night) “when the veil between the human world and the otherworld was thinnest.” Armstrong masterfully brings the midwestern town of Cainsville—with its strong Welsh identity and customs—convincingly to life and ghoulishly turns the tables during the rite of Coelcerth, proving that even the most ancient of traditions are rooted in inescapable present-day realities.

While the stories up to this point in Haunted Nights impressively capture either a strong sense of setting or holiday atmosphere, it’s S.P. Miskowski’s “We’re Never Inviting Amber Again” that’s the first to invoke a palpable sense of dread. This deceptively simple tale of a suburban couple’s Halloween party being marred by the appearance of the wife’s sister, who may or may not possess legitimate occult skills, brings the heebie-jeebies in full force. Miskowski uses the invited party guest’s imminent arrival to deftly foreshadow her track record as a party killer and then follows through with the story’s pitch-perfect execution.

In Brian Evenson’s cleverly tongue-in-cheek “Sisters,” Halloween is viewed, explained, and exploited through alien eyes to great comedic effect. The gallows humor is lighthearted and fun here with a decidedly Twilight Zone vibe.

An Irish immigrant, alone and widowed in the New World, must confront folklore-inspired superstitions from the Old World in Elise Forier Edie’s heartrending “All Through the Night.” Another fine example of the myriad elements and emotions that horror can incorporate and explore effectively within the context of genre.

Guilt is the overarching villain in Eric J. Guignard’s fantastical “A Kingdom of Sugar Skulls and Marigolds.” On Día de los Muertos, an L.A. gang member is visited by some deceased loved ones in a bid to help him reconnect with a lost childhood friend to make amends. There’s a surprisingly poignant, left-field twist to this one that Guignard handles nimbly, never sacrificing the authenticity of the machismo gang culture or the lush details of his protagonist’s journey through the magical Mexican holiday. Let this one play out behind the mind’s eye like the literary equivalent of an animated Tim Burton short.

Paul Kane taps into the disquietude we’ve all felt at some point in our lives when we sense someone is standing behind us and we fight the compulsion to turn around in the goosebumps-inducing “The Turn.” Tim Nolan is raised on a steady diet of superstitions and dire warnings about Halloween by his grandmother—superstitions he must confront head-on when circumstances find him out and about on an unexpected Halloween night journey. Kane starts off strong with an unnamed evil narrating and foreshadowing, but he overuses the device to ultimate detraction.

Pat Cadigan offers up her own take on the Stingy Jack legend in the simply-titled “Jack.” A third-generation witch polices the local cemetery on All Soul’s Day awaiting the annual attempt by the titular legend to trick the recently deceased into taking his hellfire turnip lantern off his hands. It’s a solidly atmospheric tale, enhanced considerably by Cadigan’s clever inclusion of some modern-day technology that ably aids her acolyte protagonist.

John Langan submits the strongest—and longest—tale of the Haunted Nights bunch with “Lost in the Dark.” Cinephiles will delight in the meta twists and sheer ingenuity of this layered tale about the possible documentary origins of a popular found-footage horror film. Langan slyly (name)drops Easter eggs (which we’ll refer to here as Halloween candy to keep with the anthology’s theme) with gleeful abandon throughout this thoroughly enjoyable, downright creepy story. Fans of exhaustive documentaries on iconic film franchise villains like Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers will delight in meeting Bad Agatha.

John R. Little’s futuristic “The First Lunar Halloween” scores the enviable—if daunting—task of closing Haunted Nights. Anyone familiar with Little’s work knows he’s a writer up to the task. With Earth destroyed by aliens and surviving mankind living on a moon-based settlement called Tranquility, a school field trip to the lunar surface to recreate the quaint earthy holiday of—you guessed it—Halloween brings intended scares and unintended consequences.

Editors Datlow and Morton and their assemblage of talented Haunted Nights contributors have sixteen opportunities to scare their readers’ pants off. A few—Miskowski and Ford, preeminently—surpass expectations and succeed. A few others, like Edie and Guignard, surprise with their emotional resonance. Others still—Jones, Armstrong, and Langan—bring a refreshing sense of originality to a holiday (at least in the hands of lesser writers) that’s prone to cliché. Haunted Nights succeeds as a whole largely because of the diversity of its parts, a credit to Datlow and Morton in constructing this exemplary anthology.  

Purchase Haunted Nights, edited by Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton.