The Dead Man and Other Horror Stories

Those familiar with SFWA Grand Master Wolfe (1931–2019) only from his science-fantasy novels will be pleasantly surprised by this collection of 28 convention-subverting horror shorts. These twisty tales often end somewhere very different from where they began. “In The House of Gingerbread” begins with an evocative fairy tale opening, “The woodcutter came up the walk, and the ornate old house watched him through venetian-blinded eyes,” but it shifts gears when Tina Heim opens the door, becoming a police procedural: Tina has been implicated in the suspicious deaths of her husband and child. From there, multiple satisfying plot twists alter the reader’s impressions of both Tina and the Grimm source material. In the chilling “Redbeard,” a friend of the narrator’s relates the blighted history of an abandoned house in a rural area and ends by raising difficult questions about the nature of responsibility for another’s actions. In “The Vampire Kiss,” a street urchin explains his unusual association with another’s dinner preparations by narrating the terrifying circumstances of witnessing his parents’ deaths, apparently from a ghost that drained their blood. These forgotten tales from a genre titan form the perfect complement to 2010’s The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction. (June)