Loading ...Tesseracts Thirteen edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell
This thirteenth edition of the Tesseracts anthologies showcases a variety of Canadian writers from across the country. It delves into various genres including horror, dark fantasy, paranormal, suspense, and the macabre. The anthology divides itself into the sub-categories of Youth, Mythology, and Relationships, as well as a preface from both editors and an extensive review of the last two centuries of Canadian dark fantasy and horror fiction by Robert Knowlton.
Youth
Stone Cold by Kevin Cockle: Deals with a mysterious illness that keeps a man freezing and paralyzed within his own skin, and his terror when he foresees the same for someone dear to his heart.
Striges by Daniel Sernine: A homeless woman wanders the streets, remembering what once was before she is faced with a brutal and realistic murder by something that cannot be real…. or can it?
Kids These Days by Rebecca Bradley: A disease has taken the life out of all the children in the area….they are nothing more than zombies and the parents must deal with the future as slaves to their needs.
Quints by Edo van Belkom: Five miles down the road from the site where the infamous Dionne quints drew their first breaths, another poor farming family finds themselves with the blessing or curse of five identical quintuplet boys and a doctor who helps them in more ways than one.
An Abandoned Baby Carriage by Kevin Kvas: An antique baby carriage sits abandoned but unaffected by the weather and elements year after year, and the mysteries around it expand to include a bootie and baby teeth appearing.
Silence by Stephanie Short: The Pied Piper revisited as the children of the town are made to follow the piper out of town, only to be forced to do his bidding and obey his every command.
The Weak Son by Matthew Moore: The ghost of a young man is trying to get his father to admit to his brother his guilt in the suicide that took his life, before abandoning him in the cabin forever.
Billy and the Mountain by Jason Ridler: Two rather oddball youths find themselves the target of the local bullies, and find solace and strength within the comic and characters that they invent.
The Tear Closet by Suzanne Church: A young girl and her mother find solace and protection in a small closet where they shed the tears an abusive husband and father refuses to allow them.
Relationships
Little Deaths by Ivan Dorin: Death is not always what it seems, and a former assassin-whore does not get what she expects when the tables are turned on her.
His One True Love by Catherine MacLeod: On the day a woman buries her husband, she is attacked by a BlueJay before and after finding her husband’s stash of cash.
Eurydice in the World of Light by Andrea Schlecht: Getting his beloved back from death’s realm seems to be a great gift, until she shows that she is not the same woman as before.
Bed of Scorpions by Silvia Moreno-Garcia: A pair of siblings looking for their next mark find that a cursed young man is not as he seems, and has the power to change them both forever.
Overtoun Bridge by Bev Vincent: A haunted bridge continues to lure suicidal dogs to leap to their deaths and pulls on the town residents to find the answers to the mystery.
Dead to Me by Kelley Armstrong: The “ghost” of a woman’s soon-to-be Ex hopes to escape the prison she has confined him to for the rest of his natural and unnatural life.
Mythology
Viaticum by Katie Harse: A slave must work through the process of his grief and ultimate realization of his own demise as he is locked with his master within a tomb.
A Patch of Bamboo by Jill Snider Lum: A foreigner does not forsee that his actions after following a ghost and retrieving a lost heirloom might affect the life of another.
The Radejastians by David Nickle: A man finds himself drawn into the inner workings of a religious group, and must face the repercussions when he gets in too deep.
The Woods by Michael Kelly: An old man is confronted about his knowledge of the windigo by the local law as they search for answers in a missing persons case.
The Language of Crows by Mary E. Choo: A woman must face her dying husband and his wishes to have her keep his pet crow and his sister with her after he is gone, despite her very real fears that there is more to the crow in the cage and the ones on the house than is truly possible.
Lost in a Field of Paper Flowers by God Rollo: A young paralyzed man is visited in the hospital and in his dreams by an old woman who leaves him paper flowers that make him bleed in his dreams, but make the person responsible bleed in reality.
The Night Before the Storm by Jean-Louis Trudel: Kassim awakes to find himself and his old friends specters, walking the streets as they take one last look at the village that will be forever changed in the morning light.
End in Ice by Alison Baird: A young woman glimpses a snowy owl on the national monument and foresees a future with the ice cap swooping down to cover the nation and beyond, but awaking in the morning finds that her foreknowledge might indeed have more truth than fiction involved.
I must say that this collection of horror stories will not only make you think, but at times give you pause regarding the relevance of this book. Some stories are very intense in their subject matter, but they all give the reader a very good overview of the broad nature of this genre. I particularily liked some more than others, and would include “The Weak Son,” “The Language of Crows,” and “Lost in a Field of Paper Flowers” as my favorites. The contibutor’s stories cover a wide spectrum of horror fiction, and “Out of the Barrens,” an essay covering the history of Canadian horror fiction, by Robert Knowlton provides a very detailed view of how this genre has been portrayed from coast to coast. As a reader you may not be accepting of all the subjects, but there is no doubt that it is horror writing at the top of the field.
Book Stats:
- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing; 1 edition (July 30, 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1894063252
- ISBN-13: 978-1894063258
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(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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