Going for the chill factor

THE alliterative title hints at something unsettling: “Dark Delicacies,” a new anthology that can be described only as horrifying.

Del Howison, founder of the Burbank horror bookstore-emporium Dark Delicacies, and Jeff Gelb have compiled 19 never-before-published stories by emerging and established writers in the genre -- among them Whitley Streiber, Steve Niles, Ramsey Campbell, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Ray Bradbury and Clive Barker. Streiber’s “Kaddish” has a Gothic grandeur that would surely make Flannery O’Connor proud, a story replete with Southerners, Bible-thumpers and comeuppances.

Barker’s “Haeckel’s Tale” is nearly Poe-worthy. Set in the early 19th century, an elderly German scientist recounts a vivid and terrifying story once told by his former colleague, Ernst Haeckel, of a close-up encounter with necromancy -- an event that defied the storyteller’s initial intellectual skepticism and logic. Barker’s narrator retells the story now, he says, “as a way of clearing it from my mind.” Yet as the narrator faces his own death, he concedes that “I have, if you will, fled Haeckel’s story over the years; hidden my head under the covers of reason. But here, at the end, I see that there is no asylum to be had from it.”

Author Debbie Lynn Smith, a writer and producer of such TV shows as “Murder, She Wrote,” delves into familial violence and gore with her story “The Fall.” Suspense is established from the start, with a staccato drumbeat of foreshadowing: “Ryan is afraid of the dark. He is afraid of the thunder that rumbles outside like the stomach of some hungry beast. He is afraid of the lightning that gives glimpses of things hiding in the dark.”

In his introduction to “Dark Delicacies,” Gelb argues that even in a scary, post-Sept. 11 world, horror fiction is still worth reading.

“What makes us crave a good fright?” he asks. Because it allows readers “a release of some of the tension and stress that life pushes at us daily.” With a good horror story, “we can let loose the worst nightmares imaginable, follow them to the most horrifying extremes, and still come out safe on the other side.”

There have always been “imps and monsters, supernatural events and psychological terror,” Howison notes in his concluding essay, citing such classics as “Beowulf” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

In this anthology, which the editors hope is the first of many more, Bradbury’s “The Reincarnate” evinces the kind of dialogue more likely to provoke laughter than spine-tingling fear when a member of the undead laments to another ghost the careless treatment they receive from the living:

“They slam the earth in our faces and carve a stone to weigh us, and shove flowers in an old tin and bury it,” he says. “Once a year! Sometimes not that! Oh, how I hate the living. The fools. The damn fools!” He plots revenge against them, adding, “We will kill! They have neglected us too long. If we can’t live, then they won’t! And will you come, friend? I have spoken with many. Join us. The graveyards will open tonight and the Lost Ones will pour out to drown the unbelievers. You will come?”

Such stilted utterances evoke the “Unfrozen Caveman” character played by the late Phil Hartman on “Saturday Night Live.” Or at the very least, they offer a primer on how not to write dialogue, unless in the case of spoof.

Although a few stories in the collection are just plain silly (Nancy Holder’s “Out Twelve-Steppin’, Summer of AA,” for instance), most are vividly conveyed narratives of terror, bloodletting and grisly death. Some even inject a bit of twisted humor into their nightmares.

For readers new to the horror genre, “Dark Delicacies” is by no means the most comprehensive introduction, or even the best. Veteran fans, however, should find this collection sufficiently repulsive, spooky and chilling.

Carmela Ciuraru, editor of six anthologies of poetry, is a regular contributor to Book Review.