Slow Burn

Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Award finalist Allen (Aftermath of an Industrial Accident) presents a titillating collection of 14 horror stories and poems. Throughout, Allen takes the idea of nothing being as it seems to supernatural extremes. In “The Green Silence,” the narrator waits impatiently for some kind of succubus named Violet to come out of her periodic hibernation. (“Whenever Violet goes dormant, Gerry pines for her with a skin-peeling, meat-dissolving hunger he does not dare express.”) Allen’s lyricism works better in his prose than in his poetry, which can sometimes be too abstract to deliver real scares, as in the collection opener “The Windows Breathe,” a somewhat generic haunted house poem. On the other end of the spectrum is the blunt, bloody narrative poem “The Strip Search,” in which the speaker is disemboweled upon their entrance to hell in order to remove all hope from their body. Though readers hoping for straightforward chills may long for something more to hold onto, these slippery, surprising stories will appeal to horror fans seeking something fresh. (July)