This Fresh Hell ed. by Katya de Becerra and Narelle M. Harris
“He regretted his choices, wished he had lived differently, contributed more to his society rather than been a burden on it. He didn’t know if he’d make it to the top before the crushing met him. Already, it was reaching his toes. He screamed loud, louder, but no sound came from him as the chasm gobbled his feet.”
~ Paperweight by Eugen Bacon & Clare E. Rhoden
This thrillingly subversive anthology of horror-aligned short stories will be a delightful pick for many genre fans. Edited by Katya de Becerra and Narelle M. Harris (who both have stories within), contributors were asked to write a story based on a common horror trope with a twist. What follows is a range of storytelling that feels at once familiar and entirely new.
Straight out of the gate, Chuck Mckenzie’s ‘The Dark Man, By Referral’ takes the well-known trope of the boogieman, commonly used to terrify young children, and recreates it as something new but just as sinister. Using commonplace details, like a children’s sticky spider toy that walks down walls, the children in Mckenzie’s story find new ways to reap revenge on those who’ve wronged them:
“He took the Spider, opened the door to Mum’s room, stood listening to Trent’s gurgling snores for a moment, then gently tossed the Spider into the darkness underarm and closed the door again. Then he went to the lounge room and watched all the cartoons that Trent never let him watch anymore.”
In Claire Low’s story, ‘After I Found Her’, one person’s trash becomes another’s pulsing obsession as narrator Jess discovers a discarded doll while poking through other people’s junk for items to resell. While needing some restoration, the doll could be worth a decent sum, so Jess sets about tidying her up.
Following the natural elevation of events (Jess becomes obsessed, the doll seems to make its way around the apartment on its own, and cries are heard late at night), Low strips back the supernatural to present readers with even more haunting realisations around motherhood and impossible task it poses:
“It’s stuck. I’m stuck. I can’t finish the job. She’ll always be like this, and those cries are destined to find me every night. I begin to cry big, heavy sobs.”
Other tropes include the Aussie favourite of breaking down in the outback and needing to hitch a ride (one of my worst nightmares) as well as haunted houses and sirens calling unsuspecting victims to their final breaths. Two stand-out favourites for me come from Tansy Raynor Roberts, whose inventive approach in ‘The Haunting of Life 3’ intrigued me no end.
Told through a series of bullet-point lists, our narrator details a range of strange goings-ons related to ‘The Haunted Lift’ including “Reasons I Believe The Lift is Haunted’ and ‘Messages I Have Discovered In The Haunted Lift.’ It’s a playful take on the genre and made me chuckle more than I anticipated I would when I first began this collection.
My other favourite comes from Annie McCann. In ‘Twisted Elegance of the Deep Green Sea,’ McCann brings her Indonesian heritage to life with the story of Nyai Roro Kidul, a supernatural being in Indonesian folklore and Queen of the Southern Sea in Sundanese and Javanese mythology. I loved the fast pace of this one and the excellent dialogue between the characters:
“Soothing sounds of the West Javanese gong and suling, so soothing I am caught in a spell. Suddenly, scales appear across her face, emerging rapidly from her left eye down to her chin. Half her face turns into a sea serpent, teeth morphing into sharp, lethal fangs.”
The range of settings and locations are inventive and innovative, as is the diversity of the characters who find themselves exploring the challenges these nineteen writers place them in. My only gripe was that the collection as a whole was one final proofread away from being as tidy as this reader (and copyeditor/proofreader!) would have liked to see. Erroneous spaces between words and sentences, rogue letters in the middle of sentences, and just an overall tightening of some of the stories would have polished this up and saved readers from the niggly distractions these minor but obvious errors leave in their wake.
So far, the collection has received excellent recognition. Eugen Bacon and Clare Rhoden’s story ‘Paperweight’ has been longlisted for the 2023 British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards under Best Short Fiction. Chuck McKenzie’s ‘The Dark Man, By Referral’ has been shortlisted in the 2023 Aurealis Awards, and now Claire Low's ‘After I Found Her’ has been shortlisted for a 2023 Australasian Shadows Award.
As with many anthologies, readers will enjoy some stories more than others – but that’s always one of the great things about these collections. There really is something for everyone to delight in and find new authors whose work they can continue to seek out.
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com.
