Revelations

Clive Barker headlines Winter's follow-up to his groundbreaking anthology Prime Evil (1988), but the real star here is Winter himself, who guides 13 leading dark fantasists through a brilliant dissection of apocalyptic moments of the 20th century in order to augur insights for the approaching millennium. Although his crew of visionaries comprises nearly a Who's Who of modern horror, the writers' decade-by-decade consideration of the 1900s yields mostly non-supernatural tales in which history proves as powerful a lens as the macabre for studying human behavior under extreme conditions. Several contributors use famous cataclysms to focus their human dramas: Joe Lansdale, in ""The Big Blow,"" stages a boxing match steeped in primal savagery with the Galveston tidal wave of 1900 as its backdrop; David Morrell, in ""If I Should Die Before I Wake,"" tells a tale of compassion and heroism during the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918. Others evoke the spirit of their chosen decade more broadly. Richard Christian Matheson's ""Whatever"" cleverly divines the death of the counterculture in the fate of a 1970s rock band; Ramsey Campbell's ""The Word"" pricks the ballooning millennialist fervor of the 1990s with pointed black comedy. The shadow of WWII looms over five of the selections but manifests most gloomily in David J. Schow and Craig Spector's ""Dismantling Fortress Architecture."" In a wraparound fantasy, Barker probes the mythic potential of ordinary lives with reflections that cement the other 10 stories into a loose but cohesive mosaic. Ingeniously conceived and executed with finesse, this volume impresses with its rendering of lives lived in the shadow of catastrophe and with its acknowledgment that horror is just one of many emotional responses to human intimations of mortality. (May)