Horror Clichés Revisited
04/27/2006
Rector, Jeani After Dark: A Collection of Horror. Baltimore: Publish America, 2005. 383 p.
Every time someone asks me what kind of books I like to read, as soon as I say “horror fiction,” what I usually get is a polite smile. Of course, this is always better than a raised eyebrow, and inevitably a comment like, “Oh, you mean with monsters? Vampires, werewolves and such?”
I have to explain that yes, those are the classical horror themes and motifs, the standard clichés, but that horror is much, much more, and the term must be taken in a broader sense.
However, life is unpredictable. Who would have expected the debut horror collection of a new writer to be totally and faithfully devoted to paying respects to the most time honoured, outworn clichés of horror fiction? That's exactly what Jeani Rector has decided to do in After Dark.
Name a standard genre subject and you'll find it therein. That being said, I will admit that sometimes the results are interesting, and sometimes downright disappointing. For instance, “The Golem” is a nice retelling of the famous legend, revisited with uncommon insight, and the excellent “The Black Death” effectively depicts the spreading of the plague in medieval London, as seen through the eyes of a young country girl.
By contrast “Famous” and “The Boogeyman” are weak stories about the subjects of the doppelganger and the typical childhood monster, respectively. The unevenness of the collection does not end there: “Spirits in the Night” is the entertaining adventure of a boy meeting a bum in a graveyard and finding the solution to a murder case, but “Dem Bones” elicits more disgust than dread by describing the summoning of rats by an Indian medicine man to punish the stealing of his bones, while “Ghoul” is a rather puerile Voodoo tale set in the world of psychiatry. There are also a couple of dull fairy tales about a banshee (“Night of the Banshee”) and a sea monster (“The Kraken”), not to mention a boring vignette describing the deeds of two body snatchers (“William Burke”).
I would be remiss, however, to not point out that I did enjoy some of the collected tales, such as the cute “Horrorscope,” featuring a weirdo obsessed with horoscopes, and the novella The Rye Witch, a gothic feuilleton which recreates the hysterical atmosphere surrounding the Salem witch trials. The latter piece is quite entertaining, although very predictable with its Manichean representation of the good people and the bad guys.
I have to say that Rector is a good storyteller. Her writing is smooth, concise, and precise; but the overall effect of her first published stories is lessened by her total lack of originality, to the point where reading them can become extremely irritating. Hopefully in the future she will find ideas that are more genuine, and which would better suit her writing talent.