These 12 “strange stories” explore the sideways, psychological avenues of horror and the supernatural. Some of them, like “Gumball Man” and “A Different Kind of Heartworm” are akin to Steven King stories, but with a higher vocabulary threshold. Others are more like Twilight Zone episodes: eerie, unsettling, or wistful. Almost all the titles involve puns or wordplay, deriving dimensions from the story that follows.
The title story, for example, is about a photographer named Justin, who takes pictures of places and buildings just in time, before they are demolished or zoned for destruction. He ekes out a precarious living, having turned his back on the 40-hour work week route, thus tempting providence in one sense. When he returns to Providence to display some of his work at his alma mater’s art gallery, he finds himself lured by recollections of the past, his own college years, and then, inexplicably, by glimpses of Lovecraft himself. Now a dream-Providence is tempting him. Gradually, he deduces the presence of a Lovecraftian, otherworldly intrusion… a hungry one!
“The Men at the Mound” is a story of haunts. Raedwald, king of East Anglia, is trying to keep peace between his people who honor Wotan and the old gods, and the Christians in their midst. Peace-bribes are expensive, but wars are costly too. A timewarp allows him to glimpse a piece of the future that is sadly, poignantly, relevant to him, but not in a way he can understand, and he seems to the one future witness no more than a revenant himself.
“Into Your Tenement I’ll Creep” is horror with a side of irony. “Power of Midnight” is about a record, “the vinyl Necronomicon,” that alters the world for the worse every time it is played. That sure explains a lot about the last 33 years, doesn’t it? “Passenger Bastion” is the hard SF contribution, set in a what if? future where planes are fueled by “enriched” coal, and are kept aloft only so long as someone keeps shoveling. In this story, it is people’s attitudes, and their indifference, that are horrific.
This collection is varied in its themes and narrative voices as if Robert Browning had switched from persona poems to writing short fiction. And the cover art by Barbara Briggs Silbert is great. ~~ Chris Paige
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