If you’ve been a long-time follower of this blog, you’ve probably noticed by now how much I love anthologies—especially anything edited by the inimitable Ellen Datlow. So of course I had to pick up her latest horror collection, Screams from the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous, which came out back in June. If you love monsters, this book has quite the selection!
Screams from the Dark takes as its central theme the concept of “monsters and the monstrous.” In the introduction, Ellen Datlow meditates on possible definitions of these terms and what purpose monsters serve in our fiction and popular culture, ultimately concluding, “Monsters are our mirrors: in them, we see who we hope we are not, in order to understand who we are.” This introduction is followed by twenty-nine short stories, by a good mix of newer/lesser-known authors and some of the biggest names in the genre right now—including Stephen Graham Jones, Cassandra Khaw, and Joyce Carol Oates. The collection does an excellent job of incorporating monsters from different cultures and mythologies, with a diversity of characters and stories set all around the world. The monsters in this collection also range from terrifying supernatural beings and eldritch entities to ordinary-seeming humans and animals. Overall, this was far from the best Datlow anthology I’ve read, though that is setting the bar fairly high. I tend to prefer smaller anthologies with a narrower focus—like the sea-themed Devil and the Deep anthology or the Halloween-themed Haunted Nights anthology. “Monsters” is about as broad an approach as you can take to horror, and stringing together twenty-nine stories by different authors winds up a bit unwieldy. I found this collection to be rather hit-or-miss, but it still definitely contained some gems.
My favorite stories in this collection were ones that featured truly unique monsters. The most frightening of these was Rattle-Tap from A. C. Wise’s story “Crick Crack Rattle Tap.” The monster itself comes from a rhyme the narrator’s mother used to scare her with as a child, a type of boogeyman with which to threaten misbehaving children. But now that Kiersten herself is a new mother, the monster takes on a new meaning for her. Kiersten is haunted by images of Rattle-Tap’s branch-like fingers tapping at her daughter’s window in the same way that she is haunted by the thought that she is a “bad mother”—that she might be turning out just like her own mom. Wise does an incredible job of using the idea of a childhood boogeyman to explore the topics of postpartum depression, the guilt and insecurity new mothers often face, and the double standards when it comes to society’s expectations of mothers vs. fathers. The other story I found most frightening is the final tale in the collection, “Bloedzuiger” by John Langan. The monster in this story is said to be a type of dark elf from Scandinavian folklore, but its description is unlike anything else I’ve read. Gray in color and with a jelly-like body, the bloedzuiger can take on different shapes and has an appetite for brutally killing people and draining their blood. In Langan’s story, an older woman tells the narrator how her grandfather was killed by a bloedzuiger as a cautionary tale against ice-fishing in the area. The wintry, isolated setting combined with a monster that can shapeshift and speak in the voice of your loved ones make this tale truly harrowing.
But while these two new monsters are the ones most likely to appear in my nightmares, several of the stories in this collection also had fun and creative takes on the classic monsters we all recognized from literature, film, and popular culture. My favorite tale in this collection was Stephen Graham Jones’s “Children of the Night,” which revels in a whimsical dark humor. In this tale, a Bigfoot hunter thinks he’s finally made his big break when he finds what seems to be the corpse of a sasquatch that’s been hit by a truck. But as he investigates the body, a series of increasingly absurd reveals draw the narrator toward a poetic end. In a complete shift in tone, one of my other favorite stories was Fran Wilde’s “The Midway,” which takes on the classic deep-sea monster, the kraken. Rather than sinking ships in the middle of the ocean, however, this kraken has been harnessed by a corrupt carnival owner to power the rides and lights in a world where electricity is scarce. After the kraken develops a taste for human blood, the carnival owner simply decides that certain sacrifices will have to be made. But the carnival’s newest employee realizes that what the kraken truly wants is its freedom.
You can find Screams from the Dark on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or purchase it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Have you read this collection? Which story was your favorite? Do you have other horror anthologies you would recommend? Let me know in the comments!