“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”
—Terry Pratchett
This is the tenth introduction I have written for one of these volumes. Each one seems to get shorter. (Thus the title of this introduction. In nuce means, literally, “in a nutshell” in Latin.) Part of the brevity is because I gave up trying to define horror a long time ago and have never tried to clarify the meaning of dark fantasy.
Mostly I have less and less to write because I’ve grown wise enough to recognize the stories say everything that needs saying.
This time out you’ll find quite a few ghosts, but not always scary ones; monsters (and gods) but no vampires, zombies, or werewolves. (Nothing against them, mind you, simply the way it turned out.) A couple of dark magicians and more fairies than usual. There’s at least one princess, knight, and evil king herein and two stories in which crows are featured.
Some stories are surreal, some very real; others are neither. There are tales of love and loss and hate and revenge and wickedness and a great deal about human emotions and relationships. There’s plenty of life and a considerable amount of death, but possibly more about the space between the two than decisively one or the other.
Characters are old, young, midway in age, and sometimes beyond such considerations.
Our narratives take place in the past, the present, and alternatives of both. We’ll journey into several futures and do some time traveling. There are a variety of vague surroundings and some easily identifiable settings—like Australia’s Outback, Los Angeles, Chornobyl, Charleston, New Orleans, the Oregon Coast, Kensington Gardens, Singapore, Vienna to name a few—but they may not be the same places you are familiar with. You’ll find yourself under seas, in sewer pipes, on buses, in a coal mine, and many other places.
Stories vary in length from the very short to the reasonably long. Happy endings are never guaranteed, but don’t expect unhappy finales either.
As for the authors: some names will be familiar, others brand new. The stories were originally published in well-known periodicals as well as obscure venues, in major anthologies and minor ones, in pixels only as well as in print.
What do they have in common? If you have an imagination, I think you’ll enjoy at least a majority of them, maybe all. So best get to it!
Summer Solstice 2019
Paula Guran