Black Gate

“How are they moving like that? she thought. A few adults were running and then — at that moment — instinct took over, and she darted toward her son, not noticing when she knocked down another woman who was kneeling and tugging at her hair, not hearing the new screams, the screams of terror that were replacing the sounds of life like a spreading fungus…” (pgs. 40-1)

Back when I was a graduate student, back when I thought I was so busy, I actually had quite a bit of time to keep up on the newest horror writers coming down the pike. Now that I’m in the so-called real life world of jobs and mortgages, I find it difficult to stay on top of new horror. But I still keep my ear to the ground, and one name that I keep hearing about over and over is Philip Fracassi and his new novella Altar. Now that I’ve finally read it, I can see what the fuss is all about.

Before getting into the story, let me first say something briefly about the creepy cover art of Altar by Matthew Revert (see his work on the cover of the 2014 tribute anthology to Laird Barron, Children of Old Leech). This cover has, as far as I can see, little to nothing to do with the story within, though it interestingly sets a good mood for later in the story. This is not a complaint, just a note to those who haven’t read it yet. I wouldn’t want this cover to foul up someone’s enjoyment of this story with false expectations. And to be fair to the publisher, I’m not sure what would’ve counted as an apt piece of art for the cover of this horror novella. Why is that?

This story is about a summer’s day at a local community pool. But it’s this seemingly innocent setting that really sets the reader up.

Though not set in any noticeably particular time period, Fracassi really transported me back to those lazy summer days when I was a kid. I was completely immersed in Fracassi’s detailed account of a family on their way to their local public pool and what happens when they get there. You can almost feel the sun, you can taste the chlorine, you can smell the suntan lotion, and you can even almost smell those nasty public restrooms. You can also remember the excitement of your friends at that age doing the sorts of things that friends at that age do at the public pool. In fact, at twenty-five pages in, which is half way through the story, I stopped to look at the cover again just to make sure I was reading a horror novella. At this point, it was just a very happy (and for me very nostalgic) story. There was nothing about it that suggested a horror story.

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Serbian master fantasist Zoran Zivkovic has an enviable international reputation. His novels include The Writer (1998), Impossible Encounters (2000), and The Ghostwriter (2009), and his mosaic novel The Library won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella in 2003.

But his appearances in English here in the US has been spotty. Which is one of the reasons I was so delighted to see Cadmus Press publish The Zoran Zivkovic Collection, four gorgeous volumes of his best work, translated into English:

Impossible Stories I — 422 pages, $34, November 10, 2016 (Includes “Time Gifts,” “Impossible Encounters,” “Seven Touches of Music,” “The Library,” and “Steps through the Mist”)
Impossible Stories II — 428 pages, $34, Dec 10, 2016 (Contains the collections Four Stories Till the End, Twelve Collections, The Bridge, Amarcord, and Miss Tamara, the Reade)
The Papyrus Trilogy — 608 pages, $41, August 1, 2016 (The cases of Dejan Lucik. Includes three novels: The Last Book, The Grand Manuscript, and The Compendium of the Dead)
The Five Wonders of the Danube — 198 pages, $26, August 1, 2016

All four are hardcovers featuring striking cover art by Japanese artist Youchan Ito. On his website the author calls them “the first four volumes of The Zoran Živković Collection,” which implies there will be more. The publisher claims all four volumes “will be available in hardcover, trade paperback, and electronic editions,” but for now the hardcover editions are the only ones I can find.

It’s great to be plugged into the industry, so I can hear what editors and publicists think are going to be the big books each season. And it’s incredibly helpful to be involved with a network of bloggers and reviewers who give me their take on the same thing.

But nothing beats hearing from readers — and what I’m hearing from readers is that John Darnielle’s modern horror novel Universal Harvester is the book that’s currently keeping them up at night. It’s available now in hardcover Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It’s a small town in the center of the state ― the first a in Nevada pronounced ay. This is the late 1990s, and even if the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. It’s good enough for Jeremy: it’s a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck.

But when a local schoolteacher comes in to return her copy of Targets ― an old movie, starring Boris Karloff, one Jeremy himself had ordered for the store ― she has an odd complaint: “There’s something on it,” she says, but doesn’t elaborate. Two days later, a different customer returns a different tape, a new release, and says it’s not defective, exactly, but altered: “There’s another movie on this tape.”

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