Unspeakable Horror is a truly delightful tour of horrifying possibilities involving characters attracted to the same sex. Closeted homosexuality may appear, at first glance, to be a redundant theme for such a sizeable anthology, but most of the twenty-four stories are gripping, unexpected, and universally appealing – authored by fine writers who no doubt represent the full spectrum of sexual orientations. Editors and horror aficionados Vince A. Liaguno and Chad Helder have done a stellar job choosing some wonderfully unexpected quality yarns.

Hands down, my favourite of the tales and perhaps the most representative of how far the “closet” theme can reach is “The Portico Angel” by award-winning writer Kevin W. Reardon. Here, a seventy-year-old gay widow with an extraordinary psychic gift to see into people’s lives and futures encounters a young straight man, Peter, with the same clairvoyant talents in a museum. The elder can sense Peter’s impending death, and their lives become intertwined in the most surprising ways. Reardon’s dialogue between the two characters is dynamic and explosive; alongside a charged intergenerational relationship between the confused yet overconfident young Peter and the wise but smug old man is a collision between worlds of hetero- and homosexuality. Both characters can see into each other’s souls, and Reardon’s construction of their brief but powerful encounters is nothing less than riveting. The supernatural tension of the story heightens the complex psychological debate. “The Portico Angel” is nothing less than fantastic.

Among my favourite tales were those that pushed the bounds of horror writing. More experimental writing concludes the anthology: Sarah Langan’s dismal futuristic nuclear holocaust tale of revised Adriatic witchcraft, “The Agathas,” is deeply weird but also very much inspired by historic witch lore (perhaps inspired by Carlo Ginzburg’s account of fifteenth-century Friulano witchcraft, The Night Battles?); Kealan Patrick Burke’s “A Letter from Phoenix” reads excitingly like a classic episode of The Twilight Zone; and the absolutely twisted “The Next Big Thing” by Christopher Fox stands out as a highlight in the anthology. Fox’s writing is a perfectly engaging fusion of a Guy Maddin talkie and beat generation surrealist William S. Burroughs, filled with wonderful humour, gory sexuality, and darkly spicy plot. Every paragraph brings forth new startling scenery and is highly bizarre, but Fox also has a complete sense of playfulness – a rare feature among an otherwise sinister, more serious collection of short stories.

Michelle Scalise’s “I Am the Shadow That Walks There” is a wonderful piece of historical fiction with a gruesome ghostly plotline that certainly fuses classic horror with modern splatter. In it, two young writers from the Oxford crowd join the fight in the First World War to seek adventure, but tragedy ensues. One of them, Edmund, ends up in a psychiatric hospital (kudos to Scalise for an excellent portrayal of the asylum and medical environment during this period) and is reluctant to divulge his love for Lewis (missing in action) to Doctor Price, who in the spirit of the nineteenth-century sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing only sees same sex attraction as deviance and disease. Edmund’s quest to understand what happened and be reunited with Lewis is effective and frightening. Like many of the stories, it packs a shocking conclusion.

Belgian writer Jan Vander Laenen’s “Epistle of the Sleeping Beauty” was translated into English for the anthology, and is among the most unsettling of the stories: a man on holiday, hiding his homosexual cravings from his wife and children, seeks risky public sex and discovers a naked, dying, young man in the woods. This like many of the tales in the collection divulges the horrifying lengths some will go to fulfill lust, and is more cutting and critical than celebratory of many gay lifestyles.

The characters in these tales are not by any means gay and lesbian role models; far from, they drag the reader into discomforting situations and do little to redeem themselves or their behaviour. Even the victims of the tales garner minimal sympathy, such as the naive lad seeking cheap rent in Lower Manhattan in the creepy “Sublet” by Rick R. Reed, accepting lodging that only invites imminent doom. But the majority of these stories are unpredictable. “Vourdalak” by Michael Hacker is a truly twisted tale of a Russian hunter who emerges after a long sleep in an opera house possessed by a female stregoi; Lisa Morton’s “Double Walker” presents the classic doppelganger theme in a new light; “The Boys of Bald Cave” by C. Michael Cook is a coming of age story gone terribly wrong; and Lee Thomas’s “I’m Your Violence” is perhaps the most bloody and shocking of all of the tales, putting an openly gay police detective in the position of investigating the grisly mutilation of a pedophile. The latter story darkly contrasts an otherwise warm view of intergenerational relationships in the anthology in which lusty older men chase the buds of youth.

Youthful beauty is an age-old, constant character trait through many of the stories, almost to the point of being generic. Less conventional characters such as the seventy-year-old queer in “The Portico Angel,” the bitchy fashion designer undergoing chemotherapy in Maria Alexander’s “In Her Mirrors, Dimly,” or the ultra-creepy Agathas in the final tale were welcomed diversity amidst the march of fashionably lanky eighteen-year-old boys with high cheek bones. However, this stereotypical male youth could be seen as a reflection of atypical gay experiences and fantasies which are allowed free reign in fictional form, and some of the writers are even critical of it while employing these characters.

The only other criticism worth noting is the lack of lesbian characters. Only a handful of the stories feature women in same sex relationships, but again this is probably more reflective of a broader fascination that both male and female authors have with gay male sex. Perhaps more lesbians (bisexuals, transgendered, and curious characters) will surface in horror fiction in the future.

These are minor shortcomings given the overall strength of this anthology. The stories are bound to effectively scare many readers, and although sexual orientation is a major theme in each of the tales, it should not be seen as a deterrent for readers who otherwise would not read such fiction.

These stories are universally appealing, and both the passionate and violent types of sex presented are revealing of human nature in general. Highly recommended.

Paperback: 340 pages
Publisher: Dark Scribe Press, LLC; 1st edition (December 1, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0981863205
ISBN-13: 978-0981863207