“It’s a medical condition. I got allergies, I got asthma, I got a bad back, and I got lycanthropy…….” writes George R.R. Martin in his novella The Skin Trade from the Dark Visions compilation. Willie Flambeaux isn’t your average debt collector, he’s also a werewolf. Together with private investigator Randi Wade (who believes her father was killed by a werewolf) he tries to solve the mysterious murders that are making the headlines. Victims are flayed and found with burn marks from the silver chains that have bound them, and Willie believes he will be next. This is a murder mystery story with a difference, well written with convincing (werewolf) characters.
Reploids from Stephen King is an intriguing story of a ‘walk in’ from a parallel world, though the ending is in King’s usual unsatisfactory style and I needed to look up James Madison on the net to understand the ending which involved an image on a dollar bill. The ending was still was unsatisfactory – but interestingly James Madison was the primary author of the United States Constitution and the nation’s fourth president…..
Sneakers is a tongue in cheek horror story from King about a haunted toilet which worked very well, and gave us some haunting images of dead flies building up around a pair of sneakers that could be seen under a stall in the gents by an employee of a recording studio. Why could only he see these sneakers, was he being ‘contacted’, did ‘sneakers’ want to show him how and why he was murdered…….? Creepy.
The third story from King is Dedication, about a black maid and a successful white author staying in the hotel where she works and the black magic used to make him her unborn baby’s ‘natural father’. It was not popular with the editors of the time due to its unsavoury subject matter, but Kings story telling power overrides this enough to give you the chills you are looking for.
Dan Simmons winner of the 1986 World Fantasy Award with his first novel The Song of Kali is also here with three short stories. The first is written in a style similar to Phillip K. Dick. Metastasis is a rather disturbing tale of a man who following a head injury is able to see creatures give and then feed off tumours. He can’t save his mother, and then his girlfriend becomes infected. It is a truly nightmare vision with a messianic ending.
Vanni Fucci is Alive and Well and Living in Hell gives us a light hearted look at the bible pushers on TV in America with a surprise interviewee from Hell on a religious chat show. A very humorous look at these money spinning shows.
Finally Iverson’s Pits is a horror story on the historical side when a young boy scout, and the elderly Captain Montgomery he is assigned to at the Great Reunion of Civil War Veterans, takes an unscheduled trip back in time to the three day battle at Gettysburg. A story of betrayal, revenge and the horrors of war.
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