AFTER DARKBy
JEANI RECTOR (PublishAmerica; 2006)
At a
time when nearly every genre publication promises to “reinvent” the
horror genre, it seems downright revolutionary when a book opts for good
old-fashioned scares. That’s
the case with AFTER DARK, a collection of thirteen stories by Jeani
Rector. Most of them are
effective, no-nonsense campfire tales of the type that appear to have
largely gone out of style, at least with the major publishers.
Yes, this book was printed by a small press, which is obvious from
the claim on the copyright page that “At
the specific preference of the author, PublishAmerica allowed this work to
remain exactly as the author intended, verbatim, without editorial input.”
Much of the book appears to have been conceived specifically to
irritate the major book publishers, most notably its many history-based
tales, including “The Golem”, a dramatization of the old legend of the
Golem of Prague; “William Burke”, about the infamous Burke and Hare
murders (the inspiration for the film THE DOCTOR AND THE DEVILS); “The
Black Death”, set in the time of the Bubonic Plague that decimated
Europe in the Fourteenth Century; and “The Rye Witch”, a
novella-length account of the 1792 Salem witch trials.
It was these stories that resonated most with me.
The author clearly researched her subjects in thorough fashion and
did a fine job transposing them to fiction.
Plus Rector adds some novel twists, most notably in “The
Golem”, which answers a number of questions I’ve had about the Golem
legend, such as what exactly did the Golem, a monstrous figure created
from clay to protect the residents of the Jewish ghettoes of 16th
Century Prague, do other than scare people (which is basically all it does
in Paul Wegner’s famous 1921 film on the subject)? Did it kill anyone? And
if so how might its alleged creator Rabbi Loew (a real historical figure)
feel about that? All are
satisfactorily covered in Rector’s account, which also cleverly ties the
legend in with FRANKENSTEIN, its most famous offshoot.
“The Golem” was nominated for an International Horror Guild
Award, as was “The Ghoul”, a fine, twisty account of a voodoo curse in
contemporary America. Other
modern-day set tales include the ingeniously constructed (if slight) “Horrorscope”,
which concludes with a twist you won’t predict no matter how hard you try, and “The Boogeyman”,
a marrow-chiller about a boy who fears the you-know-what, only to discover
a real-life menace far more terrifying.
Naturally, I found some of the stories unsatisfying.
“Night of the Banshee” begins in riveting fashion but
eventually fizzles out, and “The Kraken”, about the fabled sea critter
(the inspiration for the creature from PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 2),
suffers from a similarly underwhelming finale.
As for “The Rye Witch”, the book’s longest piece, I found it
uneven. While it deserves
credit for setting the record straight on quite a few issues in the Salem
Witch trials (as portrayed in the story, the accused witches were hung,
not burned at the stake), it’s overly preachy and moralistic in its
approach, hammering home the fact that the witch trials were bad,
something most of us already knew. Then
again, though, considering the fanatical direction America has been
heading, maybe such a lesson is exactly what we need right now!
For more info, visit www.afterdarknovel.com
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