Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear [SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION] Horror Book Review

  A fresh prose tide from Australasia is hitting us—Richard Flanagan from Tasmania, Witi Ihimaera from New Zealand, and Terry Dowling from Australia are just a few.  One of the biggest waves in terms of imagination, craft and sheer wonder, Terry Dowling has a five-star volume that spans twenty years of his sure-handed storytelling, BASIC BLACK:TALES OF APPROPRIATE FEAR.  In it, inner worlds are transformed by transgression, sudden disclosure, and the fantastic.



The addictive tales include:


The Daemon Street Ghost-Trap


Downloading


The Bullet That Grows in the Gun


The Gully


The Bone Ship


Beckoning Nightframe


Stitch


La Profonde


The Saltimbanques


They Found The Angry Moon


Clownette


The Ichneumon and the Dormeuse


The Quiet Redemption of Andy the House


The Maze Man


One Thing About the Night


Jenny Come to Play


Cheat Light


Scaring the Train



    One caution—don’t read them at night or in the house alone, and never in a hotel room, especially if a blotch on the wall is sighted.  Terry Dowling is the most skilled creator of trustworthy, tea-sipping, even chatty villains in a generation, so beware.  I have been taken down (figuratively) by a few.  If I had to pick three favorite tales from the superb offerings, I’d choose “The Bone Ship”, “Clownette”, and “The Saltimbanques,” a story beyond surprising that rivals Bradbury’s best.


    BASIC BLACK was a 2007 Bram Stoker Award finalist and a 2007 International Horror Guild Award winner.


    You can hear this modern master read a new stunning tale (“Jarkman at the Othergates”) from another anthology, EXOTIC GOTHIC - FORBIDDEN TALES FROM OUR GOTHIC WORLD, by Googling “Stories Exotic Gothic”.


    Thereafter when you read any of his work, you will always hear his inimitable voice that charms and warms as it conjures and unsettles.  Some rare voices carry where an artist’s been and what he’s dreamed, as Terry Dowling’s does. All those moments of earliest discovery, from his days of exploring Aussie bushland, to roaming past a madhouse at Bedlam Point, to gazing at a cemetery called the Field of Mars, are not lost, but lived again with each word.