Northern Nights

World Fantasy Special Award winner Kelly (editor of Shadows & Tall Trees) brings together 20 horror shorts in this wide-ranging if uneven “all-Canadian anthology of dark tales” tackling “the adversarial nature of Canada’s wilderness.” Standouts include Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s lyrical “Sandstone,” about an unsettling vacation to the Canadian Gulf Islands; David Neil Lee’s vampiric western “The Church and the Westbound Train”; and Marc A. Goin’s folkloric Acadian historical “The Mi-Carême.” Children pay the price for their parents’ mistakes in Nayani Jensen’s “Rescue Station,” set 109 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia, while Senaa Ahmad’s “What Is Waiting for Her” tackles the tricky dynamics between employer and employee. Siobhan Carroll’s “In the Gulf, the Night Comes Down,” Rory Say’s “The Key to Black Creek,” and Preme Mohamed’s “The Night Birds” all explore horrible disappearances made possible by supernatural cults. Less successful are EC Dorgan’s “Prairie Teeth,” a send-up of New England gothics which is more interested in mocking “paperback heroines” than conjuring a coherent narrative; Rich Larson’s oddly paced “Do Not Open,” which is distractingly full of crossed-out words; and the gruesome body horror of Camilla Grudova’s “The Fragments of an Earlier World.” Still, this Whitman’s sampler of Canadian horror explores so many subgenres that there’s bound to be something here for every reader. (Oct.)