Edited by: Ellen Datlow
Cover Artist: Peter Lutjen
Publisher: Tor
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: April 2009
The editor states in the introduction that these stories are not joined by any common theme. Instead, they have been selected to make the reader feel unsettled and uncomfortable, with the ultimate goal of making them stick in your mind and making you squirm every time you remember the stories that really bothered you.
As an editor, Ellen Datlow has put together a number of memorable anthologies, and Inferno is no exception. Readers, especially of dark fantasy or slipstream fiction will find a number of very familiar names in the table of contents. There are stories from Elizabeth Bear, Jeffrey Ford, Terry Dowling, Christopher Fowler, John Grant, and Lucius Shepard. The stories are all well-crafted and, in a different anthology, every one would be likely to be the centerpiece of the collection, however, this isn’t an average anthology.
There are certainly gory and bloody moments in this book. There are moments of stomach churning realization and the desire to whisper “Eww!” in the mixed company of a work breakroom with people who are not privy to the world that you’re immersed in at the moment. For the most part, though, this is a more subtle, creeping terror of the sort that lingers long after the book has taken up residence on a bookshelf while newer tomes are perused. There will be at least one story in this book that a reader is going to remember with a visceral clench as the sense of reading the story for the first time is remembered. That story won’t be the same for every reader, which is the great thing about this particular collection. There’s a little something here for every reader who wants a thrill of fictional terror, from zombies, to corpses, to ghosts, it’s all in this volume, though not necessarily in exactly the way that you expect.
One of the best stories in the collection, Inelastic Collisions by Elizabeth Bear is about fallen angels and what they have to do to survive on Earth. The story is told with an emphasis on the emotions of the pair of angels and it’s both surprising and shocking the way Bear describes the two creatures.
Joyce Carol Oates has contributed a piece called Face which reads, more than anything, like a modern day fairy tale in the true Grimm tradition, despite the fact that the events in the story have no clear motive, just simple cause and effect. The framework is familiar because children always seem to have a story about some adult, meant to be avoided because bad things will happen to any child who comes into contact with that adult. For the most part, these rumors are largely unfounded. This story, though, answers that often unasked question, “what if the rumors were true?”
The one story, though, that made me squirm and, to be quite honest made me wonder if I was going to be able to sleep that night was Hushabye by Simon Bestwick. It’s a dark story that, at first glance, seems like it might just be a typical “human monster” tale. An unemployed man witnesses a brutal attack on a child, and from there events spiral horrifically, until the very end of the story.
The originality of this collection makes it difficult to summarize any one piece without ruining the surprise of each plot. The stories range from short and relatively simple to complex and rather long. None, however, were boring, and almost every one had an expert twist.
This anthology is full of surprises which makes it a joy to read.
