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Having cut my teeth, so to speak, on the horror genre, I’m always up for a good scare. Since I’ve read so much of it, unfortunately, many of its tropes have lost their impact. I can still appreciate the artistry of a chilling paragraph or a frightening chapter in the night, but they don’t have the frisson they once did. However, many of the stories in Night Shadows are strong, top-notch terrors.

Even the introduction, A Question of Genre, is interesting—a defense of genre literature that is sensible as it is scholarly, taking lit-ra-chur down to its genre basics. I hadn’t thought about The Great Gatsby as murder mystery before, but it’s an argument I’ll use in the future.

But the meat here is the tales and one of my favorite horror authors, Lee Thomas, gets things off to a fine, creepy start with a tale of a man and his ex, “The Hollow is Filled with Beautiful Monsters.” Even before we get to the monsters, however, Thomas treats us to his usual pithy yet pointed writing:

            If a shirt didn’t fit or no longer met my aesthetic needs, it got dropped

            off at the donation station; I didn’t keep it around to burden my closet …

            Relationships fell under this same broad umbrella of organization, except

            they were easier to come by in New York than closet space.

In fact, all of the authors appearing here acquit themselves well, but this should be no surprise to anyone who’s read Herren and Redmann’s crime collections Men of the Mean Streets and Women of the Mean Streets. Carsen Taite turns a nice table in “The Zealous Advocate,” Felice Picano gives us a story about a cold room with a warm, welcoming shower in “Room Nine,” gore expert Vince Liaguno takes us to several classic slasher movies in “Matinee,” Steve Berman sideswipes us with a tale of an artist and his comic book recreations in “Capturing Jove Lunge,” and Lisa Girolami mines EVP for maximum effect in “The Roommate.”

Want more? Okay. You can’t do better than Jewelle Gomez with one of her classic Gilda vampire stories, “Saint Louis 1990,” or ‘Nathan Burgoine’s deliciously disturbed “Filth,” or the homophobic ghost in Jeffrey Ricker’s “Blackout.” And our editors are no slouches either, J.M. Redmann gracing us with “The Price” and Greg Herren scaring us out of an evening’s growth in “Crazy in the Night.”

However, the piece that gave this jaded critic a nightmare (seriously, folks) is Victoria A. Brownworth’s superbly visceral and altogether wonderful “Ordinary Mayhem.” This novella centers on Faye, a disaster photographer who comes by her work honestly due to her serial killer grandfather, who took pictures of his victims. Brownworth explores Faye’s psychodrama through her occupation, taking us deep into her childhood as well as on location as she documents the real-life horrors of war and violence. The denouement is as chilling as it gets. The last paragraph made me put the book down and say “Oh, shit.”

And when you get right down to it, there’s no finer recommendation. Buy this during the day, but read it at night for maximum effect. Another volume, please, Jean and Greg?

©, 2013, Jerry Wheeler