Darkness, My Old Friend

These 18 tales of horror were all published within the past two decades, but Pelan’s first solo collection regularly reflects antiquarian themes and sensibilities. In “An Antique Vintage” and “Old Songs Waken,” mythic survivors from the past add auras of menace and wonder to old houses. More than a third of the stories unfold in the venerable pub the Smoking Leg (a nod to John Metcalfe’s classic horror story of the same name), a repository of tall tales and stories told to a friend of a friend, including “Spider,” about a horrifically animated tattoo, and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” an homage to Robert Hichens’s “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” that goads its amorous ghost to jealous desperation. Pelan’s no-frills storytelling style is direct and effective, steering the reader straight to endings that sometimes have twists and invariably provoke chills. Illustrations by Allen Koszowski evoke the ghoulish physicality of the stories’ horrors. (Sept.)