Inferno - 9780765315588

?Excellent . . . Award-winning sf/fantasy editor Datlow's first nonthemed collection includes 20 stories by British and Australian writers that run the gamut from the grotesque (by Joyce Carol Oates, K.W. Jeter, and Mark Samuels), to family-security worries (Simon Bestwick, Mike O'Driscoll, and Nathan Ballingrud), to horror with the classic bells and whistles (Conrad Williams's 'Perhaps the Last'). Glen Hirshberg's 'The Janus Tree' and Stephen Gallagher's 'Misadventure' offer a powerful sense of place. Much of the horror in this volume contains a bonus touch of weariness and depression. All of the stories are wisely chosen and deserve attention and comment.”?Jonathan Pearce, California State University, Stanislaus, Library Journal

?Datlow makes a solid claim to being the premiere horror editor of her generation with this state-of-the-art anthology of 20 new stories by some of horror fiction's best and brightest. Several outstanding selections feature imperiled children and explore the horrific potential of childhood fears, among them Glen Hirshberg's 'The Janus Tree,' which gives a creepy supernatural spin to a poignant memoir of adolescent angst and alienation, and Stephen Gallagher's 'Misadventure,' in which a young man's near-death experience as a child endows him as an adult with consoling insight into the afterlife. The compilation's variety of approaches and moods is exemplary, ranging from the natural supernaturalism of Laird Barron's cosmic horror tale 'The Forest,' to the unsettling psychological horror of Lucius Shepard's 'The Ease with Which We Freed the Beast'; the metaphysical terrors of Conrad Williams's 'Perhaps the Last'; and the slapstick grotesquerie of K.W. Jeter's black comedy 'Riding Bitch.' If this book can be taken as a gauge of the vitality of imagination in contemporary horror fiction, then the genre is very healthy indeed.”?Publishers Weekly (starred review)