by Elizabeth Donald

The strength of these tales is not in the originality of their plots: "Wonderland" features an AI that blows up power plants because it thinks death and destruction are entertaining games, "Jesus Loves Me" is about a parent disturbed by a possessed child's toy, and "Gauntlet," "Memoir," and "Our Turn" are set during an invasion by generically malevolent aliens. The atmosphere is frequently more SF than horror; that's not a bad thing, but might not be what readers expect from a book subtitled A collection of tales and terrors. What will keep those readers coming back is Donald's deceptively simple style. Even if you can recite Stephen King and all the Chucky movies from memory and think you're immune to creepy dolls, something about "Jesus Loves Me" will still get under your skin. Even if you can't say, "How about a nice game of chess?" without irony, you'll still find yourself cheering for the computer-chip designer in "Wonderland" as he scrambles to control the ghost in his machines.

The collection starts off with the vivid "Sisyphus," a deadly temporal merry-go-round that traps two lovers in a endlessly replayed car crash. It's a strong beginning, delivering both a good sense of the author's style and a nice chill down the back. The theme of sacrifice for love comes up again in "Prisoner's Dilemma," when a madman decides a married woman's fondness for her best friend constitutes adultery and imprisons her in a carnival funhouse until she declares a choice between them, and in a rather different way when five men follow their love for a kidnapped woman down "Memory Lane." No time is wasted in setting these scenes—the tender affection, the simple pleasures of a shared drive or an evening at the amusement park—but we still care enough about the characters to feel real empathy for their terror and pain.

While nearly all the horror stories center around love and relationships, the science fiction ones focus more on individual survival. Romance may make an appearance, but it's incidental next to the more pressing matter of invading aliens with vastly superior firepower. Two commandos in "Gauntlet," a computer technician in "Memoir," and young lovers in "Our Turn" run and curse and shoot pretty much nonstop, but it's hard to connect to their urgency and fear, perhaps because there's no bucolic scene-setting before they get plunged into chaos. The three tales are clearly excerpts from a larger work, and they don't stand terribly well on their own. Fortunately, they're in the minority on that count.

In the story notes and afterword, Donald writes candidly about being newly published, something that she seems to have parlayed rather abruptly into a lecturing career. "The process by which I traveled from the woman in the back of the room taking notes to the woman in the front of the room answering questions is still a mystery to me," she says, "and mostly due to luck over any talent or perseverence." (p. 194) Nonetheless, she exhorts struggling writers to write, write more, write more often, keep writing, apparently for lack of anything else to suggest. It's rather sweet that she wants to lend a hand to the strugglers and stragglers, but it also smacks of hubris at best and advertising for her lecturing services at worst. She's a beginning writer, and while the book's cover trumpets her as "award-winning," it's never actually stated what awards those are. She states up front that she can't explain how she does what she does. Given that, perhaps she should let her work stand on its own. A lot of what she does is magic, of the sort that works best when the house lights are low. Rather than launching into an awkward discussion of sleight-of-hand, the best thing she can do for her readers is slip quietly out the back and leave them to enjoy the show.