#Titanuary ‘Dark Cities’ edited by Christopher Golden

About the book…

An anthology of horror stories in urban settings whether back alleys, crumbling brownstones, gleaming high-rise towers, or city hall.

Terrifying urban myths, malicious ghosts, cursed architecture, malignant city deities, personal demons (in business or relationships) twisted into something worse virtually anything that inspires the contributors to imagine some bit of urban darkness.”

Edited by Christopher Golden, ‘Dark Cities’ is a collection which takes the normal and twists it askance to create a new, and often horrific perspective on the every day.

Featuring stories by M.R Carey, Cherie Priest, Tim Lebbon, Scott Sigler, Amber Benson, Kasey Lansdale, Simon R Green, Paul Tremblay, Nathan Ballingrud, Tananarive Due, Ramsey Campbell, Kealan Patrick Burke, Nick Cutter, Sherilyn Kenyon, Scott Smith, Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Joe R Lansdale and the editor himself, this is a dark city scape where you tread carefully or risk death-or something worse…

The concept of what a city is, and what it means, is re-intepreted by each individual writer so this takes the shape of a grief stricken man , looking for sense in the senseless in ‘In Stone’, or a modern day fable in the case of Mercy, looking for her lost child , Comfort in ‘The Way She is With Strangers’.

How each story will affect you will, I think, depend on what you understand the word ‘city’ to mean-there is so much to explore here in the respect of missed opportunities at success-see The Dogs which I was kind of on board with till a shocking act of sexual violence pulled me straight out of the story. As the book opener, this, in my humble non-editorial opinion will either have people continue to read, or else stopping right there.

I always enjoy a MR Carey story, and here we get a Parisian riff on a time loop zombie mystery in We’ll Always Have Paris, elegant and disturbing in equal measures.

Grit is a nice over easy , cafe breakfast of a story featuring Jonathan Maberry’s Monk Addison, star of the novel Ink. I’ve not read it yet but as it is set in the town of Pine Deep, which is where his eponymous trilogy is set , then I think that will be jumping up my to-read list based on what Grit delivered.

One of the joys of an anthology is picking up what short stories are like by writers who you are more familiar with at novel length, such as Nick Cutter’s The Crack, about a sleep deprived dad and his battle of wills with a screaming toddler. As a mother whose third daughter came as the complete antithesis of the previous two, and did not sleep through the night till she was 5, this gave me serious flashbacks . It is rare that the extreme lengths of how degraded, angry, frustrated and sad you feel as a parent are summed up so succinctly. It reminds me of King’s ‘The Boogeyman’.

Goodnight Prison Kings, takes a look at the cityscape and how it changes when you are no longer living and travel down a different route. Cherie Priest does a bang up job of examining the travails of the recently deceased.

The other stories are all good, I did enjoy them, I think I wished I had picked them out vicariously and not read from start to finish as that first story left such an awful taste in my mouth I had no idea down what road the rest of the book would take me.

It was hard to wash out, but I am glad to have stuck with it as the rest of the collection was packed with delights and oddities alike.

The creation that they constructed was uneven, probably would not pass a safety inspection and is most likely built on a cemetery, but, as anthologies go, I expected what I got from the writers I knew.

And when you are familiar with the works of Tananarive Due and Paul Tremblay, for example, that is not a bad thing.

About the editor…

Christopher Golden is the New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of such novels as ‘Road Of Bones’, ‘Snowblind’, ‘Ararat’, ‘Of Saints And Shadows’, and ‘Red Hands’. .

With Mike Mignola, he is the co-creator of the ‘Outerverse’ comic book universe, including such series as ‘Baltimore’, ‘Joe Golem:Occult Detective’, and ‘Lady Baltimore’.

As an editor, he has worked on the short story anthologies ‘Seize The Night’, Dark Cities, and ‘The New Dead’, among others, and he has also written and co-written comic books, video games, screenplays, and a network television pilot. Golden co-hosts the podcast Defenders Dialogue with horror author Brian Keene.

In 2015 he founded the popular Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival. He was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family.

His work has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award, the Eisner Award, and multiple Shirley Jackson Awards. For the Bram Stoker Awards, Golden has been nominated ten times in eight different categories.

His original novels have been published in more than fifteen languages in countries around the world

Links-http://www.christophergolden.com/

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