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Midnight Graffiti

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The toads alone make this antho worthwhile, but I really enjoyed "Rant" by Nancy Collins (in the appropriately titled PSYCHOS section). I recollected how I’d spend my idle time (not building beeramids, not laying the wood to some skank) by ignoring the whims of my folks and sitting back smugly contented that I was reading ‘Midnight Graffiti’ while all those other chumps were busy actually reading garbage assigned to them by some nimrod or another. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. W. JETER, and JOHN SHIRLEY all bring you original tales from the farthest corners of the imagination that until now could only be found in the horror-haunted pages of .

This was a wonderful collection of short stories mainly for the sheer variety of genres, styles, and moods. I will give reasonable warning that the biggest difference with this collection from others I have read is the editing. Like many early/mid 90’s anthologies (see ‘Shock Rock’, ‘Prime Evil’, and ‘Night Screams’ from my small sample alone), the ever-present Stephen King has a seldom-published contribution in ‘Midnight Graffiti’, and editors Jessica Horsting and James Van Hise unwisely decide to shoot their wad immediately out of the starting gate by opening it up with “Rainy Season”. Stephen King's "Rainy Season" is passable, but classic King filler; Neil Gaiman impresses as always - perhaps more so alongside some of the less experienced authors included in this collection. His award-winning short story "The River Styx Runs Upstream" is easily one of my favorite short stories, ever.Wait a second, that’s actually pretty crappy; if Giger committed this abortion he’d have set it aflame before it could leave his premises and tarnish his reputation. Horror is the only medium that regularly succeeds in relating the momunmental strangness of the world in an accessible, cathartic manner. It turns out that the cover illustration is actually by some total fraud named Martin Cannon, just some unfortunate slob without an original style of his own, proving he’s capable of producing something as derivative as possible of the style of Giger, sans talent. The rest of the stories in the book I didn't finish because either there was too much violence or I had no clue what went on and had to stop reading (something that I almost never do). Or Dan Simmons' "The River Styx Runs Upstream," a story of resurrection -- with a ghastly difference.

She opens the anthology with an eight-page introduction, smugly explaining to her readers every obvious, bromidic reason that people are fascinated by horror. The final story, "Dark Embrace," comes from (mercifully silent) co-editor James Van Hise and is an adroit, if somewhat predictable, story of a boy who is forced to mature with cruel haste. After that, the remainder is really bad: very short tales “Cattletruck” by Cliff Burns and “Salvation” by Lawrence Person are both rather pointless and lame while striving to be meaningful and thought-provoking, and Joe Lansdale’s attempt at comedy with “Bob the Dinosaur Goes to Disneyland” falls flat. Just knowing that this was tucked away in my laptop bag brought back a flood of memories from my angst-ridden high school days, pitifully eking out an existence as the typical underachieving, uninspired white kid in Suburbia, USA.I want to get married says the world's smallest man: I can't explain why I liked this story, as it was pretty strange. Rather shockingly, Neil Gaiman, who I usually couldn’t care one way or the other about, actually has one of the few worthwhile reads within, with “Murder Mysteries”, a roundabout indictment of God’s alleged Master Plan and borrowing heavily from the once-popular mythos of something referred to as 'heaven' and ‘angels’.

Some of them are decent: the Gil Lamont yarn “Sinus Fiction” begins promisingly until falling apart in some misunderstanding-between-the-sexes codswallop, and the usually-reliable Dan Simmons and Harlan Ellison both offer up stories which are well below their standard, with “The River Styx Runs Upstream” and “Where I Shall Dwell in the Next World”, respectively. Midnight Graffiti (Warner Books, Oct 1992) is an engaging anthology from the now-defunct magazine of the same name from the late '80s. Both of Branham’s stories sucked, but allowing him to dominate at something is unthinkable (even if that something is having the most shitty stories included in this colelction), so I had to flip a coin to determine which travesty got a shot at the ‘honors’. Many of the stories in this book were very fun to read, all of them being fairly enjoyable in their own sense. Could I possibly be any more slick, digging the ‘cutting edge’ of contemporary fare while my foolish, conformist peers wasted their time scrutinizing some 100-year old, irrelevant piece of shit?All text (except quotes) is the property of Will Errickson and should not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission from the author. That said, I think it is important to bear in mind that some people can find stories that are designed to be pleasant, unpleasant. I especially love horror in short story form, so I was delighted to find a new collection - and thrilled to find it so gratifying. The author uses the time-honored crutch of borrowing established characters (the inhabitants of Oz) and endlessly perverting their well-intentioned natures, only to have them caught up in a boneheaded nuclear catastrophe.

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