Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, Unnamed Person Little and/or Tekno Books (eds), Mistresses of the Dark: 25 Macabre Tales by Master Storytellers. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1998. OOP
I bought this book the first time in 2019. It was supposed to come with a swag of nostalgic Point Horror. When the swag arrived it evidently had been opened somewhere between the UK and Fiji. In a still unfathomable choice, the person who opened it didn’t want the Point Horror, but was so intrigued by Mistresses of the Dark’s uninspired cover they stole the book.
This time the 543-page collection made it slowly, but safely, into my hands. It is an anthology of macabre stories by established literary authors who do not always write about the “dark side of contemporary experience” (p. x). Authors include the obvious (Angela Carter, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates) and the not-so-obvious (Ursula Le Guin, Susan Sontag, Fay Wheldon). The anthologists cared to gather geographically diverse authors, yet I note a strong prevalence of North American authors, and only two stories are written by women of colour (“Fleur”, Louise Erdrich; “Ovando”, Jamaica Kincaid).
The anthologists pose a question in their introduction: “Do these stories reflect a specifically female perspective on their themes?” (p. xi). They answer this immediately, and briefly: “To the extent that any story is inextricable from the personality of its creator, perhaps” (p. xi). We are to conclude, then, that there is no clear feminine aesthetic of the ghost story, or the horror story, or whatever the genres of these stories are. Why then bother to publish this collection at all, unless it is to argue for this supposed absence of a feminine aesthetic of the macabre?
It is hard to discern the organising principle of the anthology, beyond the gender of its authors, and the alphabet. Stories are arranged by authors’ last names, which I suppose could be to show, as happens in movies, that all the actors are equally important. The stories are naturally of unequal length, though one, called “A Spiritualist”, lacking a spiritualist, is more of an anecdote, and one, Joyce Carol Oates’ “The Virgin in the Rose Bower”, at 166 pages, makes a mockery of the notion of a short story collection. That baroque, American gothic novella is actually the first third of the 1984 novel Mysteries of Winterthurn. Its inclusion is a strange choice, especially as Oates had, even twenty years ago, plenty of other, shorter, macabre tales.
As the editors took such care organising the stories, I read them in that order. I first thought I was reading a collection of modern variations on the ghost story. Until I hit “The Bloody Chamber”. Surely an aberration, I thought, as it’s not about ghosts. Following that, “Don’t Look Now” is about a ghost, or at least about a dead child who is seen – but not really seen – and a psychic Scotswoman, and transphobia, and a serial-killing woman with dwarfism. “Fleur” contains not one ghost – not a one – only a woman who possesses the enviable power to harm the men who want to harm her.
In short, there are many ghosts here, real and psychological. There are plenty of dead and abused children. One story is set in a cemetery. The blurb would tell you that the dark secrets in that story “are so extraordinary their telling has the power to wake the dead”. Not so.
But there is also an automaton, somnambulism, a town weirdo (not Boo Radley), the personification of colonisation, and a killer pond. There is a woman who becomes an insect, maybe, an evil co-worker (we’ve all had at least one), and a strange woman living in a strange house with her strange family who finds her misplaced face in a barrel of water. This last is southern gothic, which is not supposed to be scary per se, but is a genre that trades, as far as I can tell, on the discomfort of being sweaty in confined spaces.
The introduction cites Douglas E. Winter: “Horror is not a genre. Horror is an emotion” (p. ix). It is the only place the anthologists make claim to ‘horror’. They prefer to speak of the collection in terms of the uncanny, the mysterious, and as “new and provocative approaches to the dark side of the ordinary and the everyday” (x). They have made a smart choice. Steering away from the language of horror means I am unable to write, as I might otherwise have written, “If this is a horror anthology, I do not know what horror is”.
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