The Dead Man and Other Horror Stories
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Although best known for his world-building Book of the New Sun science-fantasy saga, Gene Wolfe wrote brilliant fiction that resisted encapsulation within rigid genre categories. This volume collects twenty-eight tales spanning nearly a half century—six of them never before collected—and gathered from venues as varied as men’s magazines, periodicals devoted to short works of fantasy and science fiction, and tribute anthologies to the works of authors as wildly opposed in their literary visions as Dante and H. P. Lovecraft. Although selected for their overtones of “horror,” they frequently defy the conventions that contemporary category label conjures.
Take “Talk of Mandrakes,” a tale of malignant exo-biology spun from an ancient occult legend steeped in sex magic. Or “The Other Dead Man,” a story set aboard an interstellar spacecraft that would distinguish any anthology of zombie fiction it appeared in. “Innocent” is cast in the form of a dramatic monologue whose creepy first-person narrator details increasingly aberrant behavior that defies the formal psychological diagnosis it cries out for. And “In the House of Gingerbread” recasts a classic children’s fairy tale as a dark noir whodunit.
To be sure, Wolfe willingly embraced horror’s classic tropes, but he reworked them into remarkably original signatures through his personal creative ingenuity: There is much lycanthropy, but nary a hairy transformation in his futuristic “The Hero as Werwolf.” “The Vampire Kiss” reinterprets its titular monster as a scourge of the poor in Dickensian London. And in “Why I Was Hanged,” the disadvantages of accepting advice from the ghosts of the living are made abundantly manifest.
Their macabre inflections notwithstanding Wolfe’s horror stories abound with affecting character studies that cleave the distance between the horrible and the human: the changeling child adapting to an unfamiliar life as a mortal in “Queen of the Night”; the investigator in “The Detective of Dreams” dedicated by occupation to freeing his clients from their nightmares; the woman in “Uncaged,” whose feral persona may be an expression of her true self. Wolfe’s tales of horror, like all of his fiction, are stories in which readers—however uneasily—recognize, and relate to, much of themselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Those familiar with SFWA Grand Master Wolfe (1931–2019) only from his science-fantasy novels will be pleasantly surprised by this collection of 28 convention-subverting horror shorts. These twisty tales often end somewhere very different from where they began. "In The House of Gingerbread" begins with an evocative fairy tale opening, "The woodcutter came up the walk, and the ornate old house watched him through venetian-blinded eyes," but it shifts gears when Tina Heim opens the door, becoming a police procedural: Tina has been implicated in the suspicious deaths of her husband and child. From there, multiple satisfying plot twists alter the reader's impressions of both Tina and the Grimm source material. In the chilling "Redbeard," a friend of the narrator's relates the blighted history of an abandoned house in a rural area and ends by raising difficult questions about the nature of responsibility for another's actions. In "The Vampire Kiss," a street urchin explains his unusual association with another's dinner preparations by narrating the terrifying circumstances of witnessing his parents' deaths, apparently from a ghost that drained their blood. These forgotten tales from a genre titan form the perfect complement to 2010's The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction.