Mini Book Review: The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies
I've always been a fan of horror fiction, so when I saw a listing on Amazon for a collection of horror stories by a relatively new author with such an intriguing title and generally good reviews, I had to check it out. I'm happy that I did. John Langan, the author of The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, really has a talent for putting a new spin on some of the classic monsters of the horror genre.
Vampire and zombie stories seem to be saturating the horror genre in various mediums recently, and with so many floating around, they can get fairly repetitious. The Wide, Carnivorous Sky includes two zombie stories, a vampire story, and a werewolf story--but in each case, Langan takes the monster in a new direction. In "How the World Ran Down" (one of the zombie stories), for example, the story is told as the description of a play, complete with stage directions. (According to the author's notes at the end of the book, it has actually been performed as a play.) And in the vampire story "The Wide, Carnivorous Sky," the vampire isn't truly undead--it's a lifeform that inspired the legends of the vampire, and the characters speculate about whether it's native to Earth or an alien.
Another strength of Langan's storytelling is that he focuses on the human element of the narrative. In many cases, his focus isn't so much on the monsters as on the effects that encountering them has on the human characters. In "The Wide, Carnivorous Sky" for instance, the characters are military veterans, and the psychological effects of their close call with the vampire exacerbates the issues they're already dealing with as a result of the aftereffects of war and having to deal with the byzantine bureaucracy of the VA system. "The Shallows" focuses on a single human character, showing the small day-to-day rituals that help him maintain some semblance of normalcy in a world where the stars have come right and Cthulhu has awakened.
My favorite stories in the book were "Technicolor" and "Mother of Stone." "Technicolor" was inspired by a real-life event: a week near the end of Edgar Allen Poe's life in which he pretty much dropped off the face of the earth. It also deals directly with Poe's famous story "The Masque of the Red Death", so in addition to the strong story, it's an homage to one of the founding fathers of the genre Langan writes in. "Mother of Stone" is a longer story (novelette? novella?) about various spooky occurrences that follow the excavation of a mysterious statue on the grounds of a country inn. The statue itself is unsettling enough--a headless pregnant woman--and the slow revelation of the events that followed its installation in the inn creates a wonderful sense of building tension.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book, enough so that I'm planning to purchase Langan's other short story collection, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters.