From Dark Places

[sawyl]

At Bristolcon last weekend I found myself unable to resist the temptation to buy a copy of Emma Newman's early anthology From Dark Places. Although the stories cover quite a range, from the out-and-out fantastical to the purely everyday, they are limited by a common theme of darkness and horror — either the explicit shocker sort or the quieter existential kind.

Many of the stories seem to be tales of the unexpected: as events unfold they seem to be pointing to a particular conclusion, only for a twist in the final line to transform the apparent meaning into something else entirely. Sometimes this means that an apparently innocuous little story turns into something really nasty. At other times it cuts the tension of the original and turns it into a warm joke. And in a couple of cases it adds ambiguity: is the main character suffering a psychotic break or is she really being haunted by something supernatural?

Reading the collection, I was put in mind of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar both of which contain similar sort of dark, twist ending stories. But now, thinking back to Emma's conversation with Gareth Powell at the weekend, it's just as likely that they were inspired by something like the twist ending in the Smashing Pumpkins song Lily as anything else — which, it seems to me, makes them all the more suitable for Halloween...