One of our guest reviews today, dear listener, this time – a detailed one by writer Jill Hand, who considers the ins and outs of the anthology Fright into Flight, from Word Horde, edited by Amber Fallon. And for those who don’t know of it, a bit about the forthcoming anthology Hell’s Empire, from Ulthar Press, edited by John Linwood Grant. No time for lurchings and longdogses today, we fear (that is to say, we’ve walked, fed and hugged them, but their stories will have to wait).

Fright into Flight is a compilation of horror stories focused loosely around the concept of flight, written by women only. As such, it’s also a sort of riposte (whether pointed or tongue-in-cheek we cannot say) to the recent anthology Flight or Fright (Hodder & Stoughton 2018), edited by Stephen King and Bev Vincent, which somehow managed to include NO women writers. So kudos to Word Horde.

Hell’s Empire received about forty percent of its submissions from women, and that proportion is roughly represented in the final selection set between the two anchor stories, purely on merit. Hell’s Empire is also themed, but quite tightly – we’ll deal with that first.

Entering Hell’s Empire

The concept behind Hell’s Empire is that at some unspecified point in the early to mid-1890s, the forces of Hell invade Britain, in an unprecedented event called the Incursion. Not a steampunk, fantasy or alternate Victorian Britain, but the plain old historical one.

The Incursion takes many forms, including:

subtle attempts to undermine or demoralise the British;
lone demonic appearances in unexpected places;
strikes at key places and organisations;
seemingly random acts of terror and destruction, and/or
outbreaks of direct combat between Infernal and Victorian forces.

The background is therefore a time when the main forces of the British Empire are engaged elsewhere across the globe, and those units still in the United Kingdom are depleted from sending reinforcements to conflicts overseas for years. A vulnerable time, and an ideal one should the Infernal Prince be looking for an opportunity to expand His realm.

I was asked at the time if this would be a project which insisted on only Christian symbology and tropes – the classical Hell of the church. The answer was not necessarily. It was possible that the Incursion was not the onslaught of a literal Christian Inferno, but took such an appearance to most people in Victorian Britain because of their own history and upbringing.

Another plane of existence, malign, chaotic and using the most suitable guise for its assault? Entirely acceptable. One of many ‘Afterlifes’, from Abrahamic or other religions? Fine. And there remains the possibility that it was Hell itself, most of all, that believed itself to be Hell. Perhaps we shape our nightmares until they take the form we give them?

We were sent an amazing range of tales, some of which made me quite jealous as a writer – because they included things I’d never thought of. As an editor, I don’t think I’ve ever been more delighted by the results of asking for submissions to a project.

I did wonder if we’d be buried under loads of jingoistic tales of purely military interest. We weren’t – rather the opposite. There was action and excitement, yes, with strong plots, but also much subtlety and pathos – fleeting, personal victories; dreadful losses, and a sense of true horror at a world falling apart. Wonderful tales of humanity under pressure. This is not a book where everyone wins.

Here’s an extract from the interlinking text, to give you a feel for the scope of the action:

England bore the brunt of the onslaught. If things were worse in Scotland, it was hard to tell – communication with many Scottish centres of population was lost towards the end of the first month. We knew that fighting was stiff in Northern England – Durham and its cathedral a beacon of hope, York almost in ruins, Hull a besieged port reached and supplied when possible by sea. Armed trawlers and naval patrol boats, each with their parson or priest, kept a semblance of resistance going along the east coast. Hardened chapel men and women held the line inland, bolstered by what remained of the military and the police force.

London, and many large towns in the Midlands and South East, became battlefields. Confused arenas of a war fought in burning streets, where civilians shot at anything which they could not understand, and hasty garrisons were formed from a motley of regular troops.

Religious belief itself became a battlefield. Faith and Will seemed paramount. Three Mohammedan students from Balliol College survived the destruction of Oxford, as the lost souls which were sent against them seemed unwilling to engage. A priest in Leicester stood against a spiked horde, and found that the faith he professed to his flock was a sham. He died, several times.

Christian theologians and rabbinical authorities dug deep, and found partial answers – Faith, Will, and the symbolism of earlier times. The Enochian language of Dr John Dee, whether fabricated or not, held power, as did certain aspects of the Kabbalah. The curious fact that Dee had been advisor to the greatest queen of these isles until Victoria, and that he was reputed to have coined the term ‘British Empire, was lost on most. Bullets were blessed and scratched with such symbols as were known; the people turned to holy water, cold iron and silver, whatever might work…

Hell’s Empire is due out either late 2018 or very early 2019.

Now, to that review. The greydogtales.com reviewers are not ‘staffers’ – they’re free-lancers, writers and editors who kindly help us deal with the large number of books we come across or are sent. So any opinions below the line are those of the reviewer, not the website. If we ourselves have time to read and reflect on a book, we do it in-house and say so…

Boarding Fright into Flight

Review by Jill Hand

“Fallon has collected some true gems that will be perfect for fans of horror stories centered on female power and dangerous women.”

John Linwood Grant asked me to review Fright into Flight, an anthology of horror stories written by women. Mr Grant said he chose me for two reasons: the first being the more or less indisputable fact that I am a woman. The second is that I write horror. Sometimes I write smart-ass responses to the pictures that Mr Grant posts on his Facebook page. He likes to take illustrations from Victorian novels and children’s books – saccharine drawings featuring anthropomorphic bunnies and genteel young ladies having tea — and add funny cutlines. We all have our little hobbies, and since the copyrights have expired and the illustrations have entered into the public domain he won’t go to prison. At least not for plagiarism. I can’t speak for anything else that he may be up to.

Fright into Flight is edited by Amber Fallon and published by Word Horde. It has striking cover art by Peter Nicolai Arbo of a pensive-looking ginger-haired woman astride a horse. The woman clutches a spear in one hand while in the other she holds a shield with a pointy thing on the front. The woman’s legs and feet are bare, which seems a poor choice for someone engaged in equestrian activities. The horse appears somewhat panicked, as it should be, since it and the woman are soaring above the clouds. The woman is a Valkyrie, a creature from Norse mythology whose primary role was to choose who would die in battle and who would live. They also served mead to the warriors in Valhalla and had sex with heroes. Valkyries led busy lives.

But let’s move on, shall we? Paperback editions of Fright Into Flight cost $15.99. The eBook is $5.99, which is a good value, considering that you’re getting sixteen short stories. Some were first published in the 1990s, but most are more recent reprints. One, “I Did it for the Art,” by Izzy Lee makes its debut in Fright Into Flight.

All sixteen stories have to do with the theme of “flight,” although the term is loosely defined in some cases. There’s a mix of fantasy, dark fantasy, horror, and science-fiction-based horror.

There are some real gems here, as well as a few that failed to impress me as much. I’ll name the three I liked best, in no particular order:

The collection opens with Damien Angelica Walters’s story, ‘The Floating Girls: A Documentary.’ Twelve years ago, 300,000 girls from all over the world floated up into the sky and vanished. This phenomenon was hushed up, relegated to the status of urban myth. The documentarian, Tracy Richardson, shares her personal memories of one of the floating girls, her next-door neighbor and former best friend, Jessie. The two of them grew apart after Jessie’s mother died and her father remarried. Tracy witnesses Jessie’s disappearance. Her guilt that she didn’t do more to salvage the friendship is poignant, reminding the reader of all the friendships they allowed to wither and die for no good reason. The documentary intersperses film and audio in a way that feels genuine, as if we’re reading about an actual event. It’s deftly written, with powerful imagery.

‘Wilderness’ by Leticia Trent bears the stamp of Shirley Jackson’s influence on the horror genre. Trent captures Jackson’s signature brooding sense of not-quite-rightness that slowly builds to almost unbearable tension. The main character, Krista, is traveling alone. Her flight to New Haven is delayed and the airline personnel won’t say why. Krista has lost her job for reasons that aren’t clear, and she’s just had an unsatisfactory visit with her parents. She’s planning to start over fresh, but something tells us that won’t be happening. Not when the airport workers and the police are acting strangely. It seems there might be something toxic in the air, or in the water. The other passengers are starting to regard Krista with suspicion, and we can only wonder if she’s going to end up like Tessie Hutchinson in Jackson’s “The Lottery.”

‘Every Angel’ by Gemma Files is an absolutely kickass tale. Bob is a London crime boss in the mold of the brutal Kray twins. He has developed an obsession with religion that’s getting in the way of business to the point that it’s starting to worry his right-hand man, Darger. When what appears to be a female angel is discovered roosting beneath a freeway overpass, eating live rats and the occasional hapless passerby, Darger is tasked with capturing it. Penned up in Bob’s crime headquarters, what might be an angel or a demon or a harpy or something even worse starts messing with Bob’s mind with grim observations about God and the afterlife. It’s darkly funny and the East End accented dialogue is spot-on. This is a story that can be read and enjoyed again and again.

Two stories which I feel could have gone even further with more development were Izzy Lee’s ‘I Did it for the Art’ and ‘Consent’ by Nancy Baker. In the first one, the main character, Jeff, is a photographer who gets off on drugging and raping adolescent fashion models. He’s thoroughly reprehensible and the narrative would have worked better for me if he had some redeeming qualities. I would also have liked if there was a brief explanation of the curse of Dudleytown, Connecticut. Readers unfamiliar with the abandoned village’s history would fail to appreciate why it was a bad idea for Jeff to take his bevy of Lolitas there and why really bad stuff started to happen after he did.

In the second, a best-selling horror writer has inspired the crimes of a serial killer who tortured and disfigured his victims before killing them. One survived, and she takes her revenge against the writer in a deserted airplane hangar. In this case, the “flight” theme applies not only to the location where the writer is cornered, but also to the woman’s plans to fly away afterwards on a private jet. The story poses the excellent question of what is the purpose of horror writing. I would have preferred more development of that premise, rather than focusing on the plot-line from a slasher film.

There are other inclusions in the anthology which I found difficult to get on with because of the subject matter. The presence of Native American ghosts that rape women and steal white babies for sacrificial revenge doesn’t sit comfortably with me. This isn’t the golden age of pulp fiction, where Native Americans were either noble savages or sneaky, deranged baddies. It could be nice if writers would stop perpetuating stereotypes. And yes, one had a good guy who is native, but I wish the vengeful Indian thing would stop, or at least find a new way of being expressed. Shamans are an overdone trope, in my opinion. I wish someone would write about a Native American main character who’s not wise in the ways of nature or able to summon spirits.

Speaking of horror movies, Nadia Bulkin’s ‘When She was Bad’ takes on the theme of “final girl,” the girl who survives to the end of a horror movie (or at least is the last to die.) As always, Bulkin’s prose is a treat. Her description of how the girl takes revenge against the winged monster that killed her friends brings catharsis in the purest sense of the word. We feel pity and terror, both for the unnamed girl and for the monster. It’s gorgeously done.

Despite a few possible missteps, Fallon has collected some true gems that will be perfect for fans of horror stories centered on female power and dangerous women.

The question, I suppose, is why have an anthology of all-female writers? There’s been a lot of talk lately in the horror community about the need for “inclusion” of “under-represented” groups, meaning women and various minorities and people who identify as LGBTQ. I don’t see any harm in that, although women have been writing and publishing horror forever, or at least since a teenager named Mary Shelley wrote a scary story about a doctor who stitched together pieces of dead bodies and zapped them with electricity in order to bring his creation to life.

Women write horror at least as well as men do. Mary Shelley certainly did, and Ann Radcliffe, who is credited with inventing the Gothic novel. Then there’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, the super-creepy short story about a rest cure that’s decidedly less than restful, and of course Shirley Jackson, whose The Haunting of Hill House is currently having a redo in the form of a Netflix miniseries loosely based on the original book. The new contingent of women horror writers walk in the footsteps of Shelley and Gilman and Jackson and Rebecca du Maurier and Margaret Oliphant and all the rest and are doing an admirable job.

I highly recommend Fright Into Flight. It’s got some of the best current creators of horror who just happen to be women.

Fright into Flight is available now: