Misguided Epiphanies

Breaking In

My own website.

http://www.tittybarboss.com

How very bizarre. 

This is the text of my first post there, by the way...

Ask Not for Whom the Bell Dings…

Yes, I'm aware that it's been two full months since I last posted to this journal. "Breeze", a dancer at the club who has a real job and a real life and whom we all adore, has been riding my ass every week because she says she's tired of reading about Ellen Datlow's INFERNO. All I have to say to that is "Go make some sausage gravy, beee-yatch, lol."

It's been a shitty week. The county water department dug up my front yard and replaced it with a four foot by three foot trench filled with gravel. Hendrix was cutting his fourth tooth earlier in the week and he was a bit fussy, though that's all right now. Felicia has been having nightmares, I think because of the stress of planning a wedding, getting ready to go back to school, taking care of an active nine month old, etc. Then I was forced to let go one of the people at the club whose company I really enjoyed...been pretty down about it for a week now, but there was simply nothing I could do about it. My hands were tied on this one by circumstances I had nothing to do with, and it was just one of those situations where -- well, the Owner, god love him, pays me well to take care of situations like this, so I did. It sucks. Nuff said. (But -- if you're reading this --  I'll miss ya, bro.)

I DJ'd a shift on Friday night -- the first time I've DJ'd an entire shift since I took over managing the club. It was fun, and everyone seemed pleased -- we made money, which is more than some of the clubs in town can say these days.
 
I've slacked off on writing for the Dayton City Paper for the time being, as they owe me a shitpile of money (over $250.00) for various pieces. $250 doesn't sound like alot until you realize that I only get $30 per piece, along with meal reimbusement when I review local restaurants. So we'll be holding off on writing that book review of William Vollmann's RIDING TOWARD EVERYWHERE until I see a paycheck with my name on it for some of the money I'm owed.

Mike South is coming to town March 15th or so -- should be a fun week, filled with sushi and bukkakes.

Don't ask.

NEW BOOK OF FRIGHTS PERFECT FOR A NEW YEAR

by

Tim Case Walker

INFERNO
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Hardcover, 384 pp.
Tor Books (Dec ‘07)
ISBN: 0765315580 

Lovers of dark fantasy fiction and tales of the supernatural are quick to point out that such stories, far from being solely an invention of late twentieth century writers like Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Clive Barker, have actually been popular for centuries. The horror story, they say, has been a staple of popular literature since the days of Edgar Allan Poe, and some of our greatest, most moving and enduring examples of modern literature are firmly rooted in the horror tradition: witness Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN, W. W. Jacobs’s "The Monkey’s Paw", Bram Stoker’s DRACULA, William Peter Blatty’s THE EXORCIST, and Shirley Jackson’s "The Lottery" – a story whose original publication in the staid pages of The New Yorker brought shrieks of outrage to the magazine’s "Letters" section which lasted for months afterwards.

And right they are, these lovers of scary fare. "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown", wrote one of their own, H.P. Lovecraft himself, old Providence spook and creator of the Cthulhu Mythos, and he hit the proverbial coffin nail right on the head – horror fiction is with us to stay, and who among us, after all, doesn’t love a good ghost story, even if it’s one cooked up by a couple of teenagers with some Karo syrup and a video camera and then distributed on YouTube? Those faux frights can sometimes make life’s Real Big Fears – death, divorce, disease – a bit easier to deal with, and settling in on your couch with a new book that’s filled with masterfully-written tales designed to raise the hackles on your neck (only when you’re alone in the house, of course, and with just the one lamp to keep you company, you poor thing), well, that’s just the idea of a perfect evening for many more of you than would deign to admit it in the midst of more polite, more snifflingly literary, company.

Ellen Datlow is a lover of short horror fiction, and her work as one of the best-known and most-loved editors in the field of fantastic literature is unparalleled. Her previous collections, with titles such as A WHISPER OF BLOOD, LITTLE DEATHS and THE DARK: NEW GHOST STORIES, set the standard for anthologies of frightening tales, and her work as co-editor for 20 years of THE YEAR’S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR series puts her in a unique position to assemble a new, state-of-the-dark-art horror anthology, her first to not feature a unifying theme, surprisingly. It is as if she made only one request to each one of her contributing authors – Scare me. Just scare me.

They’ve succeeded, of course, and admirably. One of my favorite stories in the book, "The Monsters of Heaven" by Nathan Ballingrud, first breaks your heart by describing the painful collapse of a marriage after a child is abducted from a park when the father falls asleep. Juxtaposed against this backdrop is the appearance of strangely injured angelic creatures which are at the time being found all over the globe. The story really hits home and never shies away from examining in detail the pain and raw emotions of a couple dealing with their own private hell. All in all, a harrowing, effective story. Stephen Gallagher’s "Misadventure" provides us with nothing less than a new way of looking at life and death, and fans of ghost stories and hauntings will enjoy it. Pat Cadigan’s "Stilled Life" is a masterful character-driven piece about still modeling – when models pretend to be mannequins, or in this case statues – in London that gets carried to a chilling extreme.

Internationally-renowned author Joyce Carol Oates is represented here with a fine, scary tale called "Face", and solid tales from authors such as Lucius Shepard, Christopher Fowler, and Terry Dowling round out what is a uniformly excellent collection of fiction. All told, Ellen Datlow’s INFERNO presents you with twenty stories -- some are quite successful, some a bit less so, but all are representative of the healthy condition and vitality of the modern short horror story.

I highly recommend this book to any reader that loves a good story. Editor Ellen Datlow is to be commended for her body of work, and this latest collection of hers deserves to be widely read.