Cemetery Dance, 2025
253 pp
paperback
I'm hopefully done with sporadic posting now. The end of January through the end of February is one giant blur -- my poor husband had three surgeries (one completely unexpected immediately on the back of the second) during that time, and I was in no kind of mental shape to do much except sit in the hospital and drink way too much coffee. Hopefully we won't be back there again.
Moving on now, and playing serious catch up, I've finished reading A Graveside Gallery by Eric J. Guignard, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award in 2020 for Edited Anthology with his Professor Charlatan Bardot's Travel Anthology to the Most (Fictional) Haunted Buildings in the Weird, Wild World (Dark Moon Books, 2021) and the Bram Stoker Award in 2014 and 2019, as well as garnering many nominations and a few other wins for his work during his career. This latest collection of his short stories has an official publication date of April of this year, with its subtitle, Tales of Ghosts and Dark Matters, offering a ginormous and not-so-subtle clue as to what readers have to look forward to in this book.
The author hits the ground running here with "Penny's Diner," setting the scene immediately with the "hypnotic line" of North Dakota highways at night. The titular diner is where a truck driver stops after driving for a few hours. He isn't exactly in his rig though; earlier that day he'd had an accident that sent him off the road and banged up his truck, so he's driving a loaner. But he might have been okay with that, had not there been more to the story. If you find yourself thinking that you may have read this one before so you know what's going to happen, you haven't. The real question is "WTF?" as you close out the story. It's pretty twisty, and a good choice on this one as the opener, setting the tone of dark strangeness for all that follows. The standout for me in this volume is "A Stroke of Death," which completely floored me with its mix of beautiful, tight writing and the sheer grotesque, "mortal carnage" the author envisions here. Odile Thibodeau was once an artist of great renown, his paintings hanging in some of the finest galleries of Montmartre and elsewhere, but now he paints for only one person, a certain Monsieur Bourguignon. Odile's paintings are unique; indeed, he has a talent that had caught his patron's eye, resulting in Odile painting exclusively for him. Now Odile is an extremely wealthy man but caught in a dire situation, with nowhere to turn and no way out of his predicament, until Monsieur Bourguignon commissions a certain subject for the artist's next painting that Odile absolutely does not want to paint. To say any more would be a crime, but really, this story is next-level work on the author's part. It is horrific and painful, but at the same time there is a strange beauty to it that I couldn't resist. I would really love to see more stories like this one -- seriously incredible. I have to also give credit to the author for his "The Ascending Lights of Yu Lan," in which an Irish sailor roaming the streets of San Francisco in 1917 finally discovers why his mother was always warning him not to go out on "nights of August's full moon."
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In Graveside Gallery, we discover that horror knows no bounds and has never been restricted by time or space. Geographically these pieces take the reader to several different locales including downtown L.A., the swampy backroads of Florida, on to Route 66 and a god-awful desert tourist trap in New Mexico and other spots where the strange meets up with the mundane. The author moves back in time and into present and future, stopping once to add an unsettling and disturbing coda to events at Andersonville, as well as a new epilogue to Mary Shelley's epic Frankenstein and a rather bizarre addition to a familiar work by Beatrix Potter. There is enough variation here to recommend this collection to any reader of horror and the strange, with solid writing that satisifies tougher audiences like myself.
My thanks to the author for my copy of his book -- nicely done.
