Dark

Modern audiences have long inured themselves to fear, trained themselves to shut off their childish nighttime terrors and scoff in the face of deliberate scares. But award winning anthologist Ellen Datlow—called "the genre's sharpest assembler of strange, dark fictions" by William Gibson, author of Neuromancer—was convinced that there was life in the ghost story yet. So she challenged a list of varied and talented contributors to scare the heck out of her.

The resultant collection singlehandedly redefines the ghost story, going far beyond the accustomed tropes and gore of horror stories to consider the only realm that still truly scares us: the unknown. The Dark takes a nuanced and disquieting look at the tormented and unquiet dead; the darkness in us, the living; and the sometimes tenuous boundary between the two.

Under the covers of The Dark, you will find a gathering of sixteen original, unique ghost stories, deftly penned by authors versed in the argot of the damned, including Ramsey Campbell, Jeffrey Ford, Glen Hirshberg, Tanith Lee, Kelly Link, Sharyn McCrumb, Joyce Carol Oates, Lucius Shepard, and Gahan Wilson. No two stories are alike; all are calculated to make it hard to be alone with the lights out. This is the stuff nightmares are made of.

Modern audiences have long inured themselves to fear, trained themselves to shut off their childish nighttime terrors and scoff in the face of deliberate scares. But award winning anthologist Ellen Datlow—called "the genre's sharpest assembler of strange, dark fictions" by William Gibson, author of Neuromancer—was convinced that there was life in the ghost story yet. So she challenged a list of varied and talented contributors to scare the heck out of her.

The resultant collection singlehandedly redefines the ghost story, going far beyond the accustomed tropes and gore of horror stories to consider the only realm that still truly scares us: the unknown. The Dark takes a nuanced and disquieting look at the tormented and unquiet dead; the darkness in us, the living; and the sometimes tenuous boundary between the two.

Under the covers of The Dark, you will find a gathering of sixteen original, unique ghost stories, deftly penned by authors versed in the argot of the damned, including Ramsey Campbell, Jeffrey Ford, Glen Hirshberg, Tanith Lee, Kelly Link, Sharyn McCrumb, Joyce Carol Oates, Lucius Shepard, and Gahan Wilson. No two stories are alike; all are calculated to make it hard to be alone with the lights out. This is the stuff nightmares are made of.

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.

Ellen Datlow is a winner of seven World Fantasy Awards, two Hugo Awards for Best Editor, two Bram Stoker Awards, and the International Horror Guild Award. In a career spanning more than twenty-five years, she has been the long-time fiction editor of Omni and more recently the fiction editor of SCIFI.COM. She has edited many successful anthologies, including Blood Is Not Enough, A Whisper of Blood, and, with Terri Windling, Snow White, Blood Red and five other titles in their adult Fairy Tales anthology series; The Green Man and The Faery Reel for young adults; and, for younger readers, A Wolf at the Door and Swan Sister. She also co-edits the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series. Ellen Datlow lives in Manhattan.