For the next couple of days I'm going to be spotlighting stories from the best horror anthology ever. It's called The Dark Descent, and it's edited by David G. Hartwell and published by Tor. Now, I buy anthologies from time to time, and they're always uneven. Usually they start out strong and taper off in quality and I lose interest about halfway through. I thought this was just the way anthologies were until I picked this one up. Nearly a thousand pages of top-notch horror fiction. Given the spotty quality of most anthologies, that's a remarkable achievement.
Anyway, today I'd like to talk about "Sticks" by Karl Edward Wagner, but it's hard to talk about that without first talking about H.P. Lovecraft. For those of us into horror fiction, H.P. is kind of like your racist uncle--he's embarrassing as hell, but you can't help but love him. Lovecraft's tales are way, way, overwritten, and he was an unabashed racist, which comes through loud and clear in his stories (usually not being white is a pretty clear sign that a character is evil.) (But then the same thing is true of Tolkein. Funny how in the whole LOTR frenzy, Tolkein's blatant racism was never really mentioned. And no, smarty, I don't mean he's anti-orc. I mean how the bad humans who fight for Sauron are the dark-skinned men of the south. I mean, honestly.)
But I digress. If you can get past Lovecraft's racism and his Poe-wannabe prose stylings, there are some genuinely horrifying ideas in his work, which is probably why it's still so popular. Basically it boils down to people discovering the existence of horrific powerful beings to whom humans are completely insignificant. It's like Sartre with screams, really--the horror of a lot of Lovecraft is the horror of discovering the insignificance and meaninglessness of human existence.
But there's the bad writing and the racism to deal with. Which is why I recommend Karl Edward Wagner's "Sticks". It's a terrifying story in the Lovecraft tradition, but without the overwriting and the racism. Check it out when you buy the whole anthology. It's still in print, and no library should be without it.
