RogerBW's Blog

2023 fantasy/horror anthology. There are things out there thave have no interest in humans, and other things that have too much.

Original publication dates range from 2015 to 2021, and there are few connections between the stories, though there are some clear thematic links.

• "Below the Kirk, Below the Hill": a lighthouse keeper finds a dead girl, but she hasn't stopped moving. This is pleasiing for me largely in the unquestioning acceptance by everyone of the existence ofa dead girl who can move and talk: it's a bit unusual, perhaps, and the gods may have something to say in the matter, but nobody's startled by it. (The gods do have something to say.)

• "Instructions": inspired by the instructions to British troops going into occupied France, this develops from obvious straightforward information to very specific information on spotting disguised enemy agents.

Use any means necessary to ensure a clean burn and to preserve the element of surprise. Under no circumstances is any British serviceman to enter the church before or afterwards in an attempt to preserve paintings, statuary, or precious metals.

• "The Evaluator": a government agent, or at least a subcontractor, goes into the back woods to look into reports of strangeness. But some of the key themes of the anthology make their first appearances here: the strangeness has already seen you coming and will infiltrate you too, and while there were perfectly good old gods there are also new gods displacing them.

We go around seeing whether people have been fucked up, pardon my French, by what we'd call 'country living,' or by the industrial chemicals, or by the furious dark ancient unknowable gods that have always lived here.

• "At the Hand of Every Beast": a massive cathedral ravages its way across mediaeval France. Why that happened… is the point of the story. Rather fine.

• "The Adventurer's Wife": I'd read this before in She Walks in Shadows and I think I stick with what I said in 2018: "starts off promisingly but repeatedly takes the most predictable course to come to an expected end".

• "The General's Turn": a baroque and decadent state forces a prisoner to play a twisted game. Beautifully elegant.

• "Sixteen Minutes": the narrator dives into his nuclear bunker, and gradually breaks.

• "Fortunato": the evacuation mission to a non-viable colonial planet meets unexpected difficulties, like the locals not being willing to leave. Fell a bit flat for me, perhaps because there's a lot of worldbuilding heavy lifting to do along with the actual story.

• "The Honeymakers": it's the bees taking over! But by this point I'm not reading the anthology for plot, I'm reading it for atmosphere, and the atmosphere here is lovely.

• "Four Hours of a Revolution": a personified death watches his target as the last hours of their life drain away. My favourite of these stories.

• "For Each of These Miseries": a deep sea base finds itself facing enemies that really ought to be impossible. This is something of an homage to Lovecraft's "The Temple", and parts of it work well, though I felt there were undercurrents of significance I was missing.

• "Everything as Part of Its Infinite Place": the world suddenly changes, and only one boy can be the hero. But should he be?

• "No One Will Come Back For Us": an entitled journalist goes into the hot zone to get the story on the plague. Remarkably subtle.

• "Willing": sometimes the gods demand a sacrifice. I'd like to read more about the world, but it works well as it stands.

• "Us and Ours": two children run away from the invasion of their small town, only to come across a group who are trying to do something about it. A sequel of sorts to "The Evaluator".

• "The Redoubtables": there was an incident at a weapons development lab that left a permanent scar on the planet. A reporter interviews one of the last of the organisers to get an answer to a key question. To me this isn't as effective as it really wants to be, perhaps because I don't find the question something to obsess over.

• "Quietus": a soldier fights and dies forever as experiments progress to try to build troops who can do without sleep. Is there any escape? Blink and you'll miss the curves of this one.

Many of the stories here cut off short by my lights: they get as far as the protagonist having worked out the natiure of the problem they're facing, but don't go on to trying to do anything about it. I find this frustrating.

But overall I very much enjoyed this collection that lies in the murky borders between fantasy and horror, not far from where the fairy tales live.