literary horror: phantom, lovecraft unbound

I finished both of these a while ago, but never got around to compiling a review.  Mea culpa!   And everybody knows I'm better at reviewing movies than books, right, so let's just get that out of the way.  I really enjoyed reading both of these.  You're guaranteed to find multiple things to love in both.

Phantom (edited by Paul Tremblay and Sean Wallace).  The description of literary horror in Paul Tremblay's introductory essay, "What's next?  What decisions are you going to make?  Does it matter the consequences?  How are you going to live through this?  How does anyone live through this?", has stayed with me.  Phantom is a very readable, delicious little book, and reading it is like watching a marathon of After Dark Horrorfest movies, if After Dark always chose good movies: you get the sense that you're reading an entertaining "indie" take on older horror tropes.  Yet these stories are grounded in human experience, in the way terrible things can fuck you up.  My favorites:

• "The Cabinet Child" by Steve Rasnic Tem.  Really lovely little story about a childless couple.  The imagery at the end really left me... silenced.  
• "The End of Everything" by Steve Eller.  Zombies and other creepy crawly facts of human life.  I don't read a lot of zombie fiction, but this was so existential and sad.
• "Kinder" by Steve Berman.  Totally absurd story about German "children" eating the furniture in a museum; totally hilarious.
• "Set Down This" by Lavie Tidhar.  A take on our new style of digital, virtual war, and what that does to the connections between people.  I found this story very sad, I have to say.
• "Invasive Species" by Carrie Laben.  "Barn Burning" meets The Birds - how can you go wrong?  You can't.  I'm officially a fangirl.
• "She Hears Music Up Above" by F. Brett Cox.  Extremely well-written and extremely strange story about a woman on vacation who, well, starts to hear music up above.

Lovecraft Unbound (edited by Ellen Datlow).  This is not a little book, and the stories are not short.  Maybe partly due to that, this was way more hit or miss for me - but I felt very, very positively about the hits - the misses weren't so much misses as I couldn't get into them at all, for whatever reason.  I'm not sure I can articulate the overall theme of the anthology, other than the creation of extremely scary, arcane underworlds and a vibe of isolation.  This isn't so much about plot and character and humanity as it is about world-building and inhumanity, beyond-humanity.  They're not pastiches, but they do feel very Lovecraftian.  My favorites:

• "The Crevasse" by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud.  Something nasty in Antarctica.  So detailed and visual and crafted.  
• "The Din of Celestial Birds" by Brian Evenson.  Something nasty in Latin America.  Sort of conquistador-horror, stayed with me.
• "Leng" by Marc Laidlaw.  Something nasty in the Himalayas, but it's not yetis.  Very creepy anthropology.
• "In The Black Mill" by Michael Chabon.  I could totally tell where this was going by the second page, but I still enjoyed the ride.
• "Commencement" by Joyce Carol Oates.  As someone who's recently gone through commencement, I got a kick out of this.
• "Marya Nox" by Gemma Files.  I wanted a bit more from this story about not knowing what you're really worshipping, but I still appreciated the ideas presented.
• "Catch Hell" by Laird Barron.  Another one of those damn childless couples goes to an inn in the woods.  Very old, pagan imagery.  This was my favorite story of the bunch.  Sort of reminded me of Midsomer Murders, except satanic.
• "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" by Nick Mamatas.  Cloverfield-esque, grassroots Lovecraft.

out of office message

Assuming all goes well, I'm going to be in Zhengzhou, China for the next two (and a half?) weeks.  Updates are contingent on my friend's ability to bypass the great internet gods of the PRC.  Hopefully any updates will not involve the word hospital.  

Laterz!