The Reading Canary: A Reminder

Series of novels - especially in fantasy and SF fiction, but distressingly frequently on other genres as well - have a nasty tendency to turn sour partway through. The Reading Canary is your guide to precisely how far into a particular sequence you should read, and which side-passages you should explore, before the noxious gases become too much and you should turn back.

Read By Dawn: Is There Life In Horror?

Longtime FB readers may remember that a while ago I lamented the state of the horror genre, at least in its print form. My main problem was that I have little to know idea of who's actually good in the field these days - oh, there's your big names, like Dean Koontz or Stephen King or James Herbert or Anne Rice, but let's face it, their work his horribly hit-and-miss at the best of times. Aside from Ramsey Campbell, I can't name a single horror author currently writing whose novels I regularly search for in book shops. Like I keep saying every time I review a horror novel, I lament the lack of a Horror Masterworks series acting as a counterpart to SF/Crime/Fantasy Masterworks - a selection of reprints of important contemporary horror novels which can act as a roadmap through this dark and unfamiliar territory.

So, imagine my delight to find the Read By Dawn collection. Produced by Adele Hartley, curator of the Dead By Dawn horror movie festival (and published, as far as I can tell, at around the same time as the film festival), this is a series dedicated to bringing to light the best in new horror writing. Is this the ray of hope I had been praying for?

Read By Dawn 1

The debut volume in the series came out in 2006, and is dominated by new, relatively obscure authors - of the 27 authors represented, 22 of them are new authors who as yet have only published short stories (a few of them even debuting in this collection). Of the five remaining, three seem to be published through small presses, one comes from an academic background in film criticism, and one is Ramsey Campbell.

Campbell's involvement in this volume seems to be mild; the cover states that he "hosts" the anthology, rather than editing it, and I get the impression that Adele Hartley was actually responsible for assembling the thing; Campbell provides an introduction (an uncharacteristically uninsightful exercise in going through the stories and summarising their themes one by one), an endpiece (a one-page mood piece), and an actual story (The Place of Revelation, which blows all the other stories in the compilation out of the water).

With such a diverse mix of writers, it's not surprising that a few of the stories fall flat. Whether it's trying to shock the reader with cheap shots (oh no! Child rape!), trying a little too hard to be a little too gruesome, or simply being very slightly unoriginal, if you look hard enough in this anthology you can find most of the mistakes you'd expect budding horror authors to make. The good thing is that you do have to look hard; most of the contributions are very effective at what they are trying to do. (The exception would be the two appalling attempts at poetry, both by the same author, which the editors seem to have accepted to fill space.)

A more troubling problem with this anthology is the length of the stories. Yes, yes, short stories aren't supposed to be especially long, but these are tiny; several stories only take up 2-5 pages. Some of them are not so much stories as mood pieces. I'm thinking especially of Before You Say a Word here; while briefly evoking a shiver down my spine is a useful skill for a horror writer to display it's a useless exercise if it isn't applied in the context of a story. I didn't care about any of the characters at the beginning of that piece, and I didn't know or care any more about them once it ended.

This brevity - whether it was a policy enforced by the editors or simply a reflection of the submissions they received - is a shame, because the best stories in this collection are the ones where the writers take the time to spread out a bit and produce a well-paced piece of work. Aside from the Campbell contribution, there's Final Girl, a grim but amusing parody of teen slasher flicks, Bloodwalker, a dark fantasy set in a world where psychics, vampires and werewolves are an accepted fact of life, and The Seventh Green at Lost Lakes, a story about golf, and a couple others too.

One thing I did notice was that very of the authors went for "straight" horror; they almost all felt compelled to add an unusual twist or spin to the genre. Whether it's the alternate world of Bloodwalker, the self-parody of Final Girl and The Seventh Green, the excessive Hostel-style attention to gore and torture of Lessons and The Kylesku Trow, or the engaging incoherence of The Bloom of Decay and Eine Klein Nachtmusik (1943), comparatively few of the writers involved in this seem inclined to write a simple no-frills horror story. There are a couple of exceptions: The Sutherland King is an excellent cautionary tale, and The Face In the Glass (despite the cheap shot at the end) is an interesting case dealing with premonition. Perhaps it's the fact that this was compiled by someone more used to curating film festivals; the stories in this compilation occasionally seem to have more in common with the likes of Hostel or Saw than, say, the sort of stories written by Lovecraft, Hodgson, or... well, Ramsey Campbell. Then again, the cinematic horror tradition and the literary horror genre are very different beasts, and the former is vastly healthier than the latter - perhaps a new approach is needed to revitalise what is in print a slowly dying genre.

The danger of the approach this collection takes, of course, is that it may well become dated over time. Bloody Books also publishes a Classic Tales of Horror series; I wonder how many of the contributors to Read by Dawn 1 will have stories appearing in a Classic Tales collection coming out in, say, 2106? Aside from Campbell, I can't point to any of the authors in Read By Dawn 1 and say "That writer is going to go far", because the anthology simply doesn't give me enough of their material to judge.

Read By Dawn 2

The benefit of being a critically acclaimed collection, of course, is that once you have a reputation, you get a heck of a lot more submissions - and the more submissions you receive, the greater the opportunity you have to cull the weaker material and select only the best. Adele Hartley receives the sole credit for this one, Ramsey Campbell having bowed out - I suppose the first collection was successful enough that his further involvement was unnecessary. There is no forward or coda from Campbell - indeed, no stories from any author who's published any novels (aside from the odd small press offerings), just offerings from the hottest short story talent on the horror circuit. And the range of offerings is much improved - there's a greater diversity of stories this time, with less reliance on serial killers and bodily mutilation as the payoff. In fact, there's some straight-up traditional stories in a classic vein, a few of which manage to be strikingly original, such as Jamie Killen's Fingers or F.R. Jameson's Adultery. The non-traditional horror stories are also excellent; The Skin and Bone Music Box, a medieval fantasy criticism of absolute power, and Sharp Things, an action thriller set in a train carriage, spring to mind. On the other hand, I think the inclusion of Rite of Passage stretches the definition of "horror" a little too far, unless The Shield or The Wire are suddenly horror now.

The improved diversity also means that there are only a few gimmicky stories in the collection, and what gimmicks there are are pretty interesting - Fat Hansel is a take on the later life of Hansel and Gretel, and the effect that shoving a witch into an oven had on their psyche, whilst And Then... consists of a single, ambiguous five-word sentence. The only stories in Read By Dawn 2 which I would say is actually bad are Pebble Toss and Dare, which squanders a wonderfully creepy opening to make a point about how MAN IS THE TRUE HORROR LOL, and Childhood, which appears to have little point beyond CHRISTIANITY TRAUMATISES CHILDREN LOL. Even those two are competently written; I take issue with the content more than the prose. At least there is no terrible poetry in this volume.

In fact, pretty much every criticism I had of Read By Dawn 1 is answered with this volume. The stories are even longer on average, so I feel like I have had a proper sample of each author's work instead of a mere taster. Success has done wonderful things to Read By Dawn; hopefully, the third volume of the series will be an even further improvement.

The Canary Says

Read By Dawn 2 is marginally better than Read By Dawn 1, but there's a few stories in Read By Dawn 1 which make the former collection worth reading too. (And hey, it's got an exclusive Ramsey Campbell short story.) With the third collection coming out in May 2008, now's an excellent time to grab the first two; naturally, the Canary will be reviewing Read By Dawn 3 as soon as it gets its beak into it. It is excellent that a compilation series pitched at new horror authors is being published in these dark days; I only wish they'd include just one or two stories from authors who've actually published novels I can find in Borders, perhaps folk who've just put out their first couple of books. Then I'd be looking in the horror section much more frequently.

Of course, that's as a reader. If I were writing horror stories, I'd definitely make sure to submit to Read By Dawn: it's an excellent way to get exposure. If mainstream horror publishers were interested in doing any more than just cranking out the latest brick by the big-name authors, they'd be throwing contracts at almost everyone who contributes to these excellent volumes. They haven't, but they've got to wise up sooner or later.