Review
Title: Twilight Tales
Editors: Joe Monson and Jaleta Clegg
Publisher: Hemelein Publications
Genre: Horror, anthology
Year Published: 2021
Number of Pages: 321
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-64278-004-8
Price: 17.99
Reviewed by Adam McLain for the Association for Mormon Letters
At their heart, horror stories center on human beings—our fears, our terrors, our dreads, our loneliness, our surprises. Consider existential terror horror. These tales—like Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, for example—provide a context in which human beings engage with a large, encompassing power, force, or being that exists outside them but influences the world in which they live. The horror of the story comes in the realization of smallness or in the comparison between existential terror and the finiteness of humanity. While Twilight Tales, Hemelein Publications’ third LTUE benefit anthology, doesn’t contain any epic existential terror horror in the eldritch or world-ending sense, each of the tales contained within evokes a sense of horror, a hint of terror, and an investigation of the human experience through the medium of what the front cover copy calls “light horror”—that is, horror stories that provide readers with “underlying unease,” as series editor Jaleta Clegg explains in her foreword, rather than “outright gore.”
Let’s begin with the cozy tales of terror. The unique part of this collection is it contains many shorter stories that provide light thrills in the form of terrifying moments that are actually cozy. Like the elderly woman on the cover reading to the creatures around her, these tales evoke a sense of comfort while also offering an unsettling to that very same easiness. The collection eases readers into its twilight tales with Donna J. W. Munro’s “Behind the Bookshelf, in the Slim Pool of Light,” which is a literary investment into the shadows flickering across the spins of books; with sentences that emanate with a surreal eeriness—“silky pools of moon that I swim through,” for example—Munro’s story sets the stage for this collection being as diverse and expansive as previous Hemelein productions. The story following it—Liam Hogan’s “First Edition”—shows a trend that I rather like in Twilight Tales: stories that complement each other being placed near or next to each other. Like Munro’s story, Hogan’s story occurs in a bookstore, but it centers on a mysterious customer who seeks a first edition of a book—to trade rather than buy. Taken together, these stories express the range by which Twilight Tales expresses its stories of horror and terror—at least, in a cozy way.
In addition to cozy terror, Twilight Tales contains stories that bring out the mundanity of life, but with an added flair of mystery and comedy, in stories like “Adventures in House Sitting” by Bill Housley, “Just Another Night in Jersey, with Dogs” by Mike Munsil, and “Transition Plan” by Scott R. Parkin. Housley’s story is a mystery about a house with very active gnomes. As the gnomes grow in their activity, so does the mystery of the house the protagonist has been tasked with watching. In approaching a very mundane task—house sitting—Housley sets up a story that connects to one of the heartstrings of stories: miscommunication and misunderstanding. Munsil’s zombie tale is rather lighter than what one would assume when dealing with the undead, the past-dead, or the rotting dead; Munsil brings a dry wit as he imagines what a post-apocalyptic zombie’s group meeting might be like. Parkin’s tale invokes the supernatural into the corporate and was rather enjoyable in his masterful technique of characterization and misdirection. Jeanna Mason Stay connects ghosts to the real estate industry in a rather ingenious way in “Just Passing Through,” making one think twice when they see a shadow flicker in their Airbnb, while Bob Rehak’s “Automath,” even though it brings in government agencies and shadowy organizations, wonders at its core about the fear involved in performing mathematical equations.
Horror, as I wrote earlier, investigates the human experience, and that is true in many of the stories contained in Twilight Tales. In Victoria Lisowski’s sobering “A Little Ghost Story,” a little boy doesn’t want to move on after dying. Through Lisowski’s haunting prose, the boy wrestles with the fear of what is beyond death and courageously tackles what tethers him to humanity and mortality. In “The Hen Gathers Her Chicks,” Rachel Lewis, with a Poe-like eeriness, layers symbolism into a well-crafted story around a mother whose son, thought to be lost in war, returns to her. Lewis’s attention to detailed characters—the mother stitching, the son wailing—brings a mundane realness to her tale that delivers the reveal in a rather gripping way.
Terror isn’t just cozy or interrogative of humanity; in many ways, it can be delivered in your backyard—behind you! Jenean McBearty’s “Bobby Ellison” illustrates this backyard terror rather well, while also crossing into the type of horror story I will be discussing next. McBearty’s story is a supernatural mystery of a friend lost in childhood; as the mystery unfolds around backyard treehouses and yard benches, we discover a fear—a child taken—that is revealed through a cognitive estrangement that leads to a level of acceptance. In this way, McBearty shows one of the highlights of this cozy horror genre—it helps in processing trauma. “Seedling” by Ralph Benton connects this backyard horror with a domestic trifle, expertly handling the horror of fixating on a specific problem or solution with the struggle of being a mother and spouse.
One of the things I love about the LTUE anthology is it brings authors who live and breathe science fiction and fantasy. Whereas most horror might have science fiction or fantasy aesthetics or elements, many of the stories contained in Twilight Tales bring science fiction and fantasy storytelling to the forefront. While this is not unique to Twilight Tales, it does show one of the boons of this series from Hemelein Publications: it is science fiction and fantasy utilized to good effect in the collection’s chosen theme. This can be best seen in the flash fiction “Invoice” by Emily Martha Sorenson. The story—barely a paragraph long—hinges upon the scientific aspect of a conquering alien race; she spends no time bringing the reader up to speed on these aliens, instead assuming her reader knows some of the generic conventions of science fiction. Instead of using science fiction as a veneer for her story, it is embedded into its very heart—even with its echoes of horror resounding from the memo.
Action and adventure abound in these horror tales that utilize the generic conventions of science fiction. Joe Vasicek’s “The Janus Anomaly” is a good example. Vasicek’s story provides mission logs for a spacefaring character who is slowly descending into a sense of madness; while the horror aspect is not entirely solved (leaving readers with a need to untangle what has happened in their own mind), the science fiction aspect brings alive the mystery of the ending. Without it occurring in space or through archival transmissions, the reader wouldn’t have the same experience with the horror aspects. To their credit, many of the science fiction stories do not deal with the existential terror that is space; instead, they handle with aplomb the “light horror” of the collection. “Not Fragile” by Randy Lindsay deals with colonizing a new planet at the behest of the intergalactic government; the twist at the end leaves the reader rethinking the premise of the story, which is inviting and unsettling. J. D. Robinson’s “Fruiting” is, at its core, a science fiction story about sibling love. The sense of horror comes from the mystery Robinson reveals as the story continues—one dealing with planet takeover and mutation—but the science fiction aesthetic, that it is the answer to the mystery while also building up the horror aspects, shows this collection’s particular strength.
In addition to science fiction tropes, fantasy, and mythology combine in many of the stories produced in this collection. Nate Givens’s “One Heartbeat to Say Goodbye” uses the terror in the unknown mystery of skinwalkers to portray a domestic horror about a couple who buy a house, trying to start their family only to be met with the local existential, mythological being. Pulling on the lore of sirens and mermaids, “Cold, Silent, and Dark” by Kary English concludes the collection by pulling the reader under the water and making them grapple with the various stories they’ve just engaged in. English’s use of lore is excellent and invokes in the tale a sense of the fantastical and the horrific in a way only a Hemelein Publication can. “Through Milkweed and Gloom” by Wendy Nikel is a young adult tale about a swamp and the magical mysteries within it; the tale is one of adventure and heart that utilizes the magic of the wilderness to probe the desires of a young heart. “The Return of Gunnar Kettilson” by Vonnie Winslow Crist weaves a tale of the undead with a family dealing with the death of a family member and what happens when that member returns; Crist is able to lightly weave otherworldly elements into her tale, making it shimmer with a veil of fantasy over it. Additionally, S. B. Houghton’s “Alma Mater” uses a conceit from The Golden Bough to understand relationships between people through the terror that comes from eating certain things; Houghton’s story envelops itself in a literary conversation with mythology that really highlights the terror we might feel of the past and its once-splendid grandeur.
The fantasy expands into the supernatural as well. “Light, from Pure Digestion Bred” by Kelly A. Harmon is a fun adventure with demons and mythology; with its snappy dialogue, the characters come alive even in such a short amount of time. “Next of Kin” by Dan Wells is a short and good introduction to Wells’s Jonathan Cleaver horror series and leaves the reader wanting to pursue more of Wells’s world. Edward Ahern’s “The Openings” brings portals to hell to a boy who is just trying to walk a dog around the neighborhood; Ahern’s voice in his main character is really exciting and brings the story to life.
Along with science fiction and fantasy, Twilight Tales also integrates other generic conventions. Steve DuBois’s and D. J. Butler’s stories, “Finger” and “Thirsty Bones,” respectively, bring the genre of western into the realm of horror. Whereas DuBois’s story provides a flash-in-the-pan western that is exciting and vigorous, Butler’s elongates his story, which takes place in his alt-history, magical Utah, and helps readers connect to the characters more. Again, these two stories show something that I rather enjoyed in Twilight Tales: the placement of the stories in conversation with each other. The reader moves from DuBois’s staccato story to Butler’s more in-depth story in a way that makes one appreciate both more. David J. West’s “There Was a Woman Dwelt by a Graveyard” can also be considered in this historical fiction vein, bringing out a sense of terror from the 1930s in an affidavit for what someone saw near a graveyard; in its simplicity, a sense of horror grows between the pages as the details are outlined and delivered to either you as a reader or the recorder—whichever you prefer to imagine. With sparse dialogue but descriptive paragraphs, “For the Light” by Gustavo Bondoni sets a stage of historical fiction that delves even deeper into the past, resurrecting the Romans for a back-and-forth story between past and present that whisks the reader away.
And, finally, some of the stories play with delightful tropes within horror and popular culture. Kirk Eckstine’s “The Cistern” uses tropes of cops and traumatic events, creating a mystery that unravels as quickly as the reader moves through the story (I was not expecting the ending for it). Michelle Ann King delivers a glimpse into mediums and the boundaries between living and dead in “Always Room for More,” while Stephen McQuiggan’s “The Festive Forties” brings into it a treatment of place—a road, a house—in a way that eerily takes the reader into a looped story. Jude Reid’s “Can’t Con an Honest John” plays on some heist and seemingly apocalyptic tropes (although the lack of clarity on both makes the tale even more enjoyable, leaving the reader creating the world as the world is delivered to them by the writer) with a mystery around a dog that is sold for food or medicine but then returns.
With thirty-one stories, this anthology really does have something for everyone—even those who might not be well-versed in the horror genre. The expansion of the amount and diversity of stories show that the LTUE Benefit Anthologies are a place in which authors, both budding and full-grown; can exist together in harmony. Clegg’s and Monson’s editorial power and ability to collect and bring in voices from across those who have been supported by and still support LTUE shines through in this collection, as I hope it continues to do in the further collections that have been and will be released.