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The Horrors: Terrifying Tales Book II

by Peter Carver, ed.

Smart horror writers know that when monsters appear, they’ve usually been invited. That is, they turn up when we are already made vulnerable by times of great stress, confusion, guilt, and fear. Since nothing combines those four states quite like being a teenager, an anthology of YA horror stories seems like a sure thing.

And The Horrors mostly is. This is Peter Carver’s second Terrifying Tales anthology – the first appeared in 2004. It has a similar mix of writers well-known and lesser-known. It also displays an element rarely seen in more traditional YA writing – the unhappy ending. As Carver wrote in his introduction to the first volume, mainstream YA writers “have engraved on their conscience a sense of duty to make sure their protagonists emerge triumphant.” The fun of horror writing, for both writer and reader, is ducking that duty.

Happy endings happen only once or twice in these 14 tales, and even then, the triumph is often morally murky. For example, when the moody, awkward boy in William Bell’s “Apollo and Dionysos” begins to revel in his newly animal self (the result of a witch’s curse), it may not be such a good thing. Elsewhere, the bad ends are less ambiguous, as in Sylvo Frank’s “Sweet Sixteen,” about a birthday boy targeted by vampires, or Sylvia McNicoll’s “Consequences,” about a young man haunted by the voice of his bullying father.

Though a few of the stories lay on too much of the spooky sauce, or are too obvious to be completely satisfying, most are engaging and effective. Almost all play with the idea that the teen years are their own form of horror, though none so overtly as Joanne Findon’s “That Time of the Month,” in which a young girl discovers she is a werewolf.

Though there’s probably nothing here that would shock older readers, it should be noted that The Horrors contains a lot of violence and blood, some swearing, a whiff of necrophilia, the occasional loss of bowel control, and – scariest of all – a dash of teen lust.

 

Reviewer: Nathan Whitlock

Publisher: Red Deer Press

DETAILS

Price: $12.95

Page Count: 184 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-88995-338-4

Released: April

Issue Date: 2006-4

Categories:

Age Range: 12+

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