Dark - ISBNLookup.com

Cemetery Dance

"Death will always have its sting and entities from beyond the grave will remain unsettling; most of us are haunted by something. Datlow's The Dark proves there is quite a gamut to run when it comes to the modern ghost and there are still chills to be found in spectral stories.

Booklist

"The ghost story is making a comeback, editor Datlow says. To prove the point, she presents 16 brand-new examples, agreeably varied in locale, period, and style...

Chronicle

"[A] first rate collection of very diverse ghost stories, which range from traditional ghosts to ghosts that aren't actually that at all.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"…one of those must-buy anthologies for anyone who enjoys well-written ghost stories that will have readers starting at shadows and turning on nightlights.

From the Publisher

" This book is sure to provide a yardstick by which future ghost fiction will be measured."—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "Top-drawer."—Kirkus Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Ghosts with surprising substance flit through this sterling anthology of new weird tales, and most have purposes more sophisticated than the chain rattling and caterwauling of their old-fashioned forebears. In Jeffrey Ford's "The Trentino Kid," the ghost of a teenager serves as an instructive specter of unfulfilled promise for the aimless narrator. Lucius Shepard's "Limbo" features an obsessive romance between a spiritually deadened criminal, who can't tell life from the afterlife, and an enigmatic young woman who complicates his predicament. In Glenn Hirshberg's "Dancing Men," the ghost is the shadow of the Holocaust, which haunts a survivor of the concentration camps and becomes an indelible legacy passed on to future generations of his family. Even when more traditional ghosts appear, such as the grandfather clock animated by the spirit of a murder victim in Tanith Lee's "The Ghost of the Clock" and the lingering influence of a madwoman that terrorizes a child in Ramsey Campbell's "Feeling Remains," they have a psychological dimension that adds depth and power to their horrors. Datlow has cast her net beyond the horror genre's usual names and pulled in contributors whose stories are the equal of their best work, as well as mystery, fantasy and SF writers whose tales seem to be the ghost story they've always wanted to tell. Just as her anthology Blood Is Not Enough (1989) helped redefine the vampire for modern readers, this book is sure to provide a yardstick by which future ghost fiction will be measured. (Nov. 5) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

". sure to provide a yardstick by which future ghost fiction will be measured."

Library Journal

In "The Trentino Kid," Jeffrey Ford tells the tale of an encounter with a drowned child, while in "Dancing Men," Glen Hirschberg conjures up an elegant memorial to real-world horrors. The 16 original stories in this anthology include contributions from Joyce Carol Oates, Tanith Lee, Gahan Wilson, Charles Grant, and other veterans of the genre. Covering a wide range of topics that explore different avenues of horror, this volume belongs in most short story or horror collections. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Original stories from a dark place, as collected by Datlow, who, with Terri Windling, edits The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror collections. The 16 here, about half by well-knowns and half by fresh voices, are meant to scare your pants off. That, of course, is unlikely, since fright hangs on surprise and if you know ahead. . . . Best foot forward is Jeffrey Ford's utterly beautiful "The Trentino Kid," which anchors its ghost in a close study of clamming in Great South Bay. If it weren't for the occasional slippery-slimy body floating by, you'd want to get out and start clamming yourself. Joyce Carol Oates's "Subway" is about a destiny-hungering woman with panting crimson lips and glistening mascara-ed eyes caught up in a recurring death-cycle on the subway. Gahan Wilson's "The Dead Ghost" tells of a person waking up immobile in a hospital bed after an explosion to discover a fat, weighty, jellylike see-through body on the bed beside him and having to push his only moveable hand through the globby muck (it exhales corpse-stink) to get to the emergency button. Kathe Koja's "Velocity" presents a sculptor whose current specialty is driving bicycles into trees. He's the son of a vile artist, whom he calls the Prince of Darkness, who apparently burned his wife alive and later suicided by driving into a tree. Now his son is sure that Dad is crawling about the pipes of the Red House, which the son has inherited: he's afraid to sit on the toilet and allow Dad to crawl up inside him. Ramsey Campbell's "Feeling Remains" offers his usual marvel of domestic satire with acidic commentary on feminist strong-arming and the failed attempt to rein in a changeling who wants to burn down a house. Also onhand: Charles L. Grant, Tanith Lee, Terry Dowling, Jack Cady, Lucius Shepard, Kelly Link, Glen Hirshberg, Daniel Abraham, Stephen Gallagher, and Mike O'Driscoll. Top-drawer.