The Garden of Delight

The 20 stories (including four that were previously unpublished) in this collection of hard-core horror fiction are slim on plot but engorged with gruesome incidents. “Mictlan” chronicles the grisly fate of defeated conquistadors at the hands of cannibal Aztecs. “Regnum Congo” riffs on H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Picture in the House” and its account of unsavory appetites nurtured in a remote rural household. A cluster of tales is set in the futuristic Paris Sud 5, “one of the ghettos of high apocalyptic impact, the new France, the new world,” whose residents regularly indulge in torture, murder, dismemberment, and other depravities. Manzetti labors to conjure vivid images but winds up with awkward prose, as in “The Man Who Ate Flowers,” whose narrator cheerily anticipates death in the electric chair as “the pinnacle of my flesh garden, the black navel of my wild ride, the continuous hunt, and the final shock.” Only a few stories stand out, and they are more memorable for their gore than for their substance. (Mar.)