The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold.

Having written those lines, Robert Service opened the cremation chamber door to a chilling sub-genre of horror fiction: terror in the Canadian wilderness. And true to these origins, many modern-day practitioners of the form mix the eerie with the humorous to produce tales at once weird and funny. This latest installment of Mosaic’s highly entertaining Northern Frights series does not fail to deliver both sickening fear and broad chuckles.

Another, lesser-known Service poem holds the key to this anthology’s true power. In “The Lure of Little Voices,” Service writes of the seductive call of the wilderness:

Yes, they’re wanting me, they’re haunting
me, the awful lonely places;
They’re whining and they’re whimpering as
if each had a soul.

This atmosphere – all too familiar to the camper or cottager suddenly awake in the night – of a strangely populated emptiness somewhere out there in the trees, makes both the setting and the fiction attractive. The best of these writers capitalize on this ghostly emptiness.

In “At Fort Assumption,” Dale L. Sproule takes the reader into the heart of the north woods and his own vision of what inhabits them. It is a hallucinogenic ride that mixes film and dream sequences quite expertly. There is a muddied point offered about Canada’s treatment of indigenous peoples, but the overwhelming frightfulness of the story rescues it from its own slim moralizing. Other noteworthy atmosphere pieces include David Nickle’s “The Pit-Heads,” and “The Children of Gael” by Nancy Kilpatrick and Benoit Bisson.

Some stories, like Mary E. Choo’s “Roses from Granny,” take a more standard Tales From the Crypt approach, bringing the reader back indoors to show that humans can be just as scary as the wild woods. Stephen Meade’s “Mirror Monster” is a grotesquely compelling peek into the world of serial sex murderers and their admirers. Some might find Meade’s reference to Paul Bernardo in poor taste, but his name is a powerful fictional tool, and it has a terrifying effect. In fact, in Northern Frights 4, there’s very little not terrifying – or at the very least entertaining in a campy, X-Files kind of way.