Last year I read and loved John Langan’s second novel (he only wrote two), the modern Lovecraftian horror called The Fisherman. So for spooky season this year, I decided to expand my experience of Langan’s writing with one of his short story collections. I don’t think there was any particular theme to the collection, but what was presented was a variety of tales in the horror genre. Most of them probably wouldn’t be called “Lovecraftian”, though. In this set, we have a cursed object story, a few ghost/revenant stories, some bad people dabbling in some dark arts, and a few that don’t quite fit the classic horror tropes but play around with format and convention. The stories in this collection were well-written, imaginative, and memorable. None were super scary (which is good, because I’m a chicken for the truly horrific), but that’s typically the way with eldritch, Lovecraftian horror — it gets you in your mind.

The longest story is not one that I enjoyed very much. “Natalya, Queen of the Hungry Dogs” essentially features a character meeting up with a terminally ill best friend who oddly requests his help to prepare for some dangers on the other side. This story had a pretty unique take on the afterlife and what kind of beings inhabit it, but I can’t say that I really liked it. Also, at the heart of the story, the title character is a petulant, angry young child — a character type which I really don’t like.

The title track, “Lost in the Dark” was classically creepy, though wrapped in a format that is somewhat meta. We have someone interviewing a filmmaker for a documentary. What put that filmmaker on the map was a horror film based on an account told by her father involving a mysterious woman at the centre of some dark and gruesome events that became an urban legend. I enjoyed this story, despite it being one of the scarier ones, but the story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure made it a little confusing.

The last story of the set, “Snakebit, or Why I (Continue to) Love Horror”, has even more fun with story format and structure. It feels like a discussion with John Langan (though he doesn’t name himself, and it’s probably not much based in reality) about why he’s so committed to writing horror fiction. Starting with a premise (“Give me a story about a college professor having a mid-life crisis, and I’m not that interested. Add a Lamia to the mix, however, and I’m on board.”) he walks the reader through variations on how he could tell that story — and in the process, tells us the story. This meta approach puts a fun spin on it; however, I didn’t find the story itself very compelling (at least not until he discusses the different endings a writer could try, and the ending he ends up choosing — that was fun).

One of my favourites of the bunch is called “Haak”, and it’s ostensibly a story told by a university professor to his class — Langan, again, seems to be playing with our sense of reality — about Heart of Darkness author Joseph Conrad’s experience while convalescing at a mountain spa in Switzerland. The Conrad character befriends a ferry captain who shows Conrad to a hidden lake and tells him a bizarre and fascinating history of events that happened there. That story is also a surprise — revealing itself as a dark retelling of a popular, classic children’s tale. You will both recognize it and not recognize it at the same time.

My other favourite, “Oscar Returns from the Dead, Prophesizing”, also had a surprising twist. The narrator is telling his son the strange tale of how when he was younger, they were taking care of someone’s pet gecko, and after the lizard died in their care, they buried it in the yard. Suffice to say, the lizard did not stay buried, and that’s only the start of how wild this story goes. At first I was prepared to dismiss this one as Langan’s attempt at telling a bit of a cozier, more lighthearted spooky tale, but I was impressed with how he took what started out as a quirky anecdote and built it up in tiny increments to a seriously sinister ending.

While I didn’t love all of these stories, I also don’t think there were any truly bad ones in the collection. They showcased very well how comfortable Langan is with writing in the horror genre. Even though many familiar tropes and story arcs were in play, Langan was able to write these stories in a fresh and engaging way. While I think that the longer form of The Fisherman was great, it was also essentially one story, bisected in the middle by another. Langan seems to be most comfortable telling shorter stories, and he seems to be good at it. He’s got a number of other collections, so I get to look forward to several more spooky seasons’ worth of stories.

4 stars

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