Crucified Dreams: Tales of Urban Horror

Apart from a misleading subtitle, Lansdale's anthology of 19 reprinted stories is solid, comprising a variety of stories from both new and well-known authors. While Harlan Ellison's superb "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" and Octavia Butler's impressive "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" certainly qualify as urban horror, many others clearly do not. David Morrell's "Front Man" is an economically written and suspenseful crime tale but not particularly scary. The desert of Norman Partridge's "The Mojave Two-Step" and the Vietnamese jungle of Joe Haldeman's "The Monster" are not exactly urban. Readers who curtail their genre expectations will be better able to appreciate the diverse themes and approaches of these stories, even the ones that don't represent the authors' best work. (Apr.)