Latest from the Chiaroscuro

An interview with Deborah Mills, woodcarver, whose images grace the covers of The Choir Boats and The Indigo Pheasant

Perfection is a rare quality in an anthology. But even coming back to Poe's Lighthouse in its Wicker Park Press re-release (it was originally put out in limited edition by Cemetery Dance Publications back in 2006), Christopher Conlon's startlingly diverse homage to the works of Poe—using an exploration of Poe's (in)famously unfinished "Lighthouse" fragment as the crux (literal or figurative at the choice of the author) of each story—is still unabashedly pitch-perfect.

In the mood to read a good horror anthology? Like to see your money go toward a worthwhile cause? Then do yourself a favour and purchase a copy of Horror For Good. All profits go to amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. If that's not reason enough, a quick glimpse through the table of contents should seal the deal. It includes stories from a number of authors with whom any fan of horror fiction is sure to be familiar: Joe R. Lansdale, Ramsey Campbell, F. Paul Wilson, Jack Ketchum, Ray Garton, and Laird Barron, just to name a few.

I sit here and I can't believe that it happened. And yet I have to believe it. Dreams or nightmares? Madness or sanity? I don't know which is which.

We're first introduced to Jessica (Zohra Lampert), right as she jumps from her husband Duncan (Barton Heyman)'s hearse and runs off into a roadside cemetery to take an impromptu tombstone-rubbing. “I'll just be one minute!” she yells back, happily. As Duncan and his friend Woody (Kevin O'Connor) lean against the hearse, waiting for her to return, Woody assures Duncan that Jessica seems fine, recovered, especially now that they've removed her from New York … “I mean, that apartment was starting to scare me.” But even as Duncan agrees, Jessica has already looked up from her rubbing to find an odd-looking girl in an archaic sack-dress, her throat circled with what looks like a bandage, gesturing to her from a nearby rock. Whispers mount on the soundtrack, along with a phantom wind, and Jessica shuts her eyes and warns herself: “Act normal. Don't tell them. They won't believe you … ”

Me'ma and the Great Mountain comes to me lovingly hand-bound by author and illustrator Lorin Morgan-Richards. It's the writer's foray into dark fantasy, his antidote to overly sanitized stories that shelter children from life's harsh realities. The book is a heroic quest set against the backdrop of destructive colonialism, as a young girl is forced to flee her village home in the wake of greedy settlers mining in the nearby mountains.

I-45 cuts through hills;
the old road
winds up and down them,
winks into being,
out again,
going Somewhere Else:
a Texas of
decayed gas stations,
slag heaps, rusted cranes,
cows having a lie-down
bridges over dry creeks
100 yards away
and I swear Grandpop’s 1963 red Ford tractor

Over this last weekend, I picked up a second-hand copy of Mario Bava's 1963 film The Whip and the Body (also known as La Frustra e il Corpo), a legendarily much-censored movie, which was the showpiece of an Italian obscenity trial. For some reason, I'd been sure it was one of Bava's “modern” films, like Hatchet for the Honeymoon or Blood and Black Lace, so I was a bit surprised to realize it actually plays far more like a Roger Corman AIP Poe picture crossbred with a Milo Manara porno comic.

Violent, vulgar, disgusting, revolting…yet intelligently irreverent; this might be your reaction to the eight tales in Mr. Pudge’s short but definitely not sweet collection of “Rednek” horror and crime. Not for those easily offended or disgusted, this collection is something of a gem in the rough.

So, first things first, an open apology to Nathan Shumate, because I wish I had better things to say about Arcane. Especially since the idea behind Arcane—create an anthology without theme, centred instead around the excellence of the stories themselves, creating as much variety as possible—is a great concept; unfortunately, Arcane's stories are not, except in a few instances, written well enough to support Shumate's goal.

In the years since its initial release, Harry Kümel's Daughters of Darkness has become a bit of a legend—a cheerfully perverse riff on cinematic vampire mythology (its four-word promotional slogan was: “Vampirism, lesbianism, homosexuality, sadism!”, which is...accurate, as far as that goes) that made almost nothing at the box office, yet still managed to amass enough of a following to get it into the second volume of critic and film historian Danny Peary's Cult Movies book series just a mere twelve years later.

I bought them at the Sally Ann.
On sale. I needed earrings for the woman
that dressed your body. She told me,
“Get turquoise for her ears.”
I always do what I am told.
who would not cry.
who would not cry.
who would not cry.
Holy are life’s accessories,
they make us who we are.
Remember stumbling
in the garden? Stone by stone,
we searched for your lost
earring, at night, in the garden
where all the flowers grew black.
Carry me now, think of us,
who would not cry.
who would not cry.

So . . . since last weekend and a little bit before, former commercial director Rupert Sanders' slightly revisionist dark fairy tale epic Snow White and the Huntsman has managed to make over $100 million, demonstrating once again (as with The Hunger Games' similarly “surprising” success) that the world may, after all, be ready for big-budget franchises spearheaded by female characters.

The label urban fantasy seems to cover wide ground these days, but if you're in the mood for a deftly executed example of this popular subgenre, then Gary Jonas's Modern Sorcery is likely perfect for you. It contains arguably all the best elements of urban fantasy, crafted together with a hardboiled yarn, and rolled into a smooth, satisfying package complete with uncluttered, humour-laden prose, quirky characters, and a perfectly paced plot.

The world is on fire

How do you view human nature? Do you take the optimistic view that a little good resides in everyone? Do you side with pessimists who expect the worst in people, even in the best of situations? In a world overflowing with senseless violence, it’s a challenge to hold the optimist’s outlook. Can anyone really deny that human beings are responsible for most of the evil shit in the world? Would a little extra love, or perhaps a better economic situation, have made any difference in extinguishing wicked tendencies?

First let’s take a look at the book itself. It's a very nicely bound hardcover with a superb old-school cover painting (think Poe, of course) and a nice surprise inside, some relevant and sometimes darkly humorous illustrations/photographs. It’s a heavy, appropriately hefty book, despite the relative brevity of its contents.

Like Shane Carruth's 2004 movie Primer, Zal Batmanglij's debut film Sound of My Voice is a strange little low-budget stunner, effects poor and idea-rich—but where Primer left audiences mainly intrigued yet alienated, Sound of My Voice packs enough emotional punch to potentially cross the geek-indie divide. Indeed, in a lot of ways, its character logic is far more effective than its plot; in retrospect, trying to parse exactly what might or might not be “true” about its events is probably the least interesting facet of the whole affair.

She pricked herself on a thorn,
No, on a needle,
No, on the sharp pieces of a
broken promise.

Carefully unbutton her blouse,
pull aside her bodice.
A tattooed rose
blossoms on her snow
white breast,
a brier drinks from
her heart.

A dark prince placed
the rose upon her. Whispered
golden promises of red
red roses.
His thorn, buried deep,
binds her.

Encased in
the bramble of his lies,
staked by his
pretty garden thistle,
she never wakes,
never dies,
forever dreams
of black red roses.

A violent thunderstorm, a cop killer on the loose, and an army of genetically modified, giant fire ants; put them all together and what do you have? The Red Empire, the titular tale of Joe McKinney’s short story collection, The Red Empire and Other Stories. Here we follow a number of different characters including a recently widowed young mother and her daughter, the latter temporarily blinded after undergoing a cornea transplant. There’s the aforementioned cop killer who, while being transported to prison, is set free due to a set of very fortunate circumstances.

No aphorism of Horace
perhaps, but still

cousinly and
in wide practice

ever since fiat lux
and the tungsten

armies of Thomas
Edison began

to spread the net --

not so much a banishing of the darkness

(the sun would never
allow this),

but a taming
or domestication

of its wavelength,
making the night seem

less worrisome,
less viral, less filled

with menace.

Not that we could
ever completely forget

on any tribal level
what the night once

meant to us, our ids
are too stained

for that. Hence, why
ghosts and the other monsters

have simply followed us indoors,
to the artificial dark

of the cineplex, while
astronomers and other

predators have largely
moved on to digital realms,

where light and shade
are tallied in 1s and 0s

and black holes
(the milk-carton children

of the cosmos) are seduced
more by algorithms

than lost puppies. And while
Death itself (the ultimate

expression of starless skies)
has been delayed

or offset by Apollonian
advances in modern medicine,

this too is artifice, like
the wearing of sunglasses

at night. We must therefore
take heed.

Even as the world's albedo
grows, to turn

our back on the oldest scourge
in our history,

to put it at technical remove,
thinking this somehow

makes us safer, may be to
our own peril.

Or as Horace never wrote:
Carpe noctem ne nox te carpat.

Seize the night, yes.

Just be careful
lest it return with a vengeance.