INTRODUCTION
I had the idea for this anthology a few years ago, when Josh and I were brainstorming projects we could work on together. Because, I mean, who wouldn’t try to pin Josh Malerman down with projects to work with him on? I’m not crazy, you know. Working with Josh is like grasping the live end of an electrical cord, with all the ensuing energy and none of the imminent death.
The idea was to come up with something that could follow on what Dark Forces, that seminal eighties horror anthology edited by Kirby McCauley, had done. Namely, bring horror to a wider audience.
That sounds ridiculous, right? Horror needs a wider audience with people like King and Straub and Rice and Barker? With the popularity of television and movie properties such as Bird Box (Josh!), Us, The Haunting of Hill House (or Bly Manor), Hereditary, Midsommar, and Lovecraft Country?
Okay, how about bring a wider spectrum of horror to the audience?
Ahh, there, ding-ding-ding.
Dark Forces succeeded in showing that horror was much more than a dark-alley genre. It wasn’t just the lowbrow backwater many literati (and many of my college English professors) proclaimed it to be. In classes, I was often told that, according to Henry James, my taste for the works of Edgar Allan Poe was “the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”
In all deference to James, suck it.
Dark Forces didn’t so much prove that horror could be soaring and literary as remind. Poe, yes, but Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins, H. P. Lovecraft, yes, even Henry James all proved that well before Dark Forces was published.
But McCauley’s Dark Forces reminded readers that this quality was a fundamental bedrock of horror. It featured writers like Stephen King, sure, but also Joyce Carol Oates and Isaac Bashevis Singer and Ray Bradbury.
So, I didn’t feel the need to readdress that. Horror can be literary. Check!
What I wanted to show—okay, really remind readers of—was horror’s vast range, the huge canvas that it can paint upon. The numerous, diverse voices that are writing horror, reshaping it, making it their own. Range is important to me as a writer, and I wanted to flaunt the range of this genre to readers.
Yes, horror can be literary. That’s important. But what’s even more important, especially now, is that we acknowledge just how expansive horror is. That horror can push more boundaries than just about any other genre and in ways other genres simply don’t … or can’t. That horror can stretch anywhere from the quiet, literary side all the way to bloody guignols, and all points between.
Within these covers are stories that run the gamut from traditional to modern, from dark fantasy to neo-noir, from explorations of traditional horror tropes to unknown, possibly unknowable threats. It’s all here because it’s all out there now in horror. I’ve said many times that we appear to be in a kind of Golden Age of Horror. We’ve gone from a time, say sixty or seventy years ago, where there were just a few successful authors out there writing horror—say Shirley Jackson or Richard Matheson or Ira Levin or William Peter Blatty or Robert Bloch—to a positive fiesta of horror authors too numerous to name, yet too good to ignore.
That’s what I wanted with Dark Stars, and that’s what I hope I’ve been able to bring to you. Some already have it, but every one of the authors in this book deserves the attention of and recognition from readers.
I’ve taken nearly six hundred words to sum up, but the idea of Dark Stars is simple. And it’s this: expand your horizons, not just about what horror can be, but what horror is.
John F.D. Taff
Southern Illinois
March 2021
THE ATTENTIONIST
BY CAROLINE KEPNES
The first time he calls, I’m not there. I’m not home to answer. I’m down at the beach. It’s 1993 when alone means alone. The beach by our house is small and stupid if you ask my sister. It’s just a pond and it’s just me. I don’t know that he’s calling. I don’t know that someone out there is thinking of me, trying to find me.
That is all I want, to be wanted, pursued, and I’m getting what I want and I’m not there to know it.
Reg is home. She doesn’t come to the beach because she doesn’t like to be away from the phone. Once I heard my dad tell my mom that Reg has the soul of a beauty and the body of a worker. My mom told him he was terrible, but she also laughed. Reg is hopeful, hungry. Her eyebrows grow so fast that she has to pluck them every day and she picks up on the first ring because that’s who she is. The ringing phone is Reg’s favorite sound in the world and the irony is that to answer the call is to silence those bells. It’s a big day for Reg. The last night of the county fair and she wants to go but not just with me, with boys. The phone is a promise. A beacon of hope. Boys, knock on wood, if she’s lucky.
“Hello?”
That’s how she always answers. Her voice lifts as if the telephone is such a mystery. The caller is no dummy. He hears the longing in her voice. He probably knows how she is. The soul of a beauty and the body of a worker. He probably senses that she fantasizes about making out with a guy on the Ferris wheel, any guy, please, someone.
“Hello,” he says. “Is Maeve there?”
You’d think Reg would be upset that he wants me, not her, but we’re sisters. In her head we’re a monolith. What’s good for me is good for her. So she’s cutesy and perky, treating every word like a barren cupcake with so much potential.
“Well … Actually…” See how she spreads out the words? Frosting on her cupcake. Creamy, or maybe sloppy. “Miss Maeve isn’t around right now…” And see that? See how she calls me Miss Maeve as if that’s a thing she calls me? It isn’t. He has Reg all figured out by now. Maybe he can see her through our bay window in the front of the house. Maybe he can’t. But he wouldn’t be surprised to know that she’s wearing these cutoffs that shrunk in the dryer. They’re tight. They cut off her circulation and leave red marks on her belly, but she wears them so that if some man called and asked what she was wearing she could be like, tiny cutoffs and a tube top. She’s not a liar, my sister, and she wouldn’t say she was wearing the shorts if she wasn’t and all summer she’s been hopeful—What if we met brothers? What if a new cute guy moved into the house across the street—and all summer I’ve been real—We don’t know any brothers. That house is condemned.
I’m embarrassed for her. Younger but older than me, the voice of reason. Impossible to imagine her on this planet before I came into the picture. But there she was and here she is, the happiest she’s been in weeks as the lights dim in the theater of her mind and she twirls the phone cord and licks her teeth.
“Well,” he says. “That’s too bad. I was hoping to catch her.”
She lies down on the sofa. Legs in the air, opening and closing. Bare feet. Can he feel her offering her body to him? God, she hopes so and she picks up a bottle of nail polish and shakes it. “Sorry to break your heart … Is there anything I can do to help?”
To this day, she cries when she gets to this part of the story, like it’s her fault, the way things went down. She’s ashamed of her own desire. Her fantasy. Her excitement about stealing him. She couldn’t help it. He reminded her of Davey.
* * *
Real quick, let me tell you about Davey.
Three summers before the summer I’m talking about, Reg was the one working at the club and she liked a member too. A guy named, well, Davey.
She had good reason to think the feeling was mutual. They kissed at a party on a beach. There was a fire pit. She thought he kissed her because of the flames. Everyone’s beautiful by a fire. Davey knew what she looked like in the daylight and he told her he’d call. But he never did. Then his family moved, I don’t know where. I just know that Reg was different when the waiting gave way to this weird form of horrific acceptance.
It was about the rejection. It wasn’t about him. He, too, looked best by the fire. He was good but not great, but being so foolish was hard on Reg. She thought she was stupid. For months she was annoying and tense. Her whole body looked different, like someone turned some screws and tightened every joint. She got skinnier and hairier. Not enough to be sent to some hospital for girls, because like she said, I can’t even do an eating disorder right. All of her sentences were like that, framed to highlight her failure as a human.
All of this for him. Stupid Davey who was only cute if you waited until dark and lit a fire.
Anyway, it was a year and a half later, almost Christmas. Reg was helping Mom clean out all the places you forget need cleaning. She and my mom got these little pads you put under the legs of heavy furniture. They managed to move the dresser in the front hall.
And Reg saw something on the floor.
A tiny scrap of paper.
Reg, Davey called 508 …
Reg screamed so loud that she woke me up. I ran into the living room.
“What happened?”
“What happened?” Reg was always that way. A bull digging in. Repeating what you said to remind you that you asked for it, as if all of your words were just food in her mouth, repurposed and regurgitated. “Well what happened is that Mom destroyed my fucking life.”
“Reg, calm down.”
“For sixteen months I have hated myself and thought I’m stupid and ugly and insane and deluded and probably fit to be institutionalized.”
“Reg, stop it.”
“For sixteen months I have been sure that I oughta be locked up, throw away the key.”
“Do you hear yourself? Where is this coming from?”
Reg cried now. Real messy sobbing. There were no words for a while, and it wasn’t the kind of crying where you go and hug her. Mom looked at me—Do you know what this is?—and I lied to Mom and shook my head. No.
Reg blew her nose on her shirt. “Mom, how did you let this happen?”
“Let this happen…”
“This is from Davey.”
“Dave…”
“Davey. Davey Lane. From two summers ago.”
“Was he here? I don’t remember a Davey.”
That was mean; it’s Mom’s house and she knows her way around. She knew that none of us had ever had a boy over back then, same way as now.
“No … you don’t get it.”
Mom laughed. “Well, what else is new?”
“Mom, it’s not funny. This message is from Davey Lane. You took this message and I liked him and he said he would call and until right now I thought he never did call and I have made myself crazy wondering why for almost two years and I can’t believe you did this to me.”
“Me? Well that’s ridiculous, Regina.”
“You ruined my life.”
“Oh I did, did I?”
“If you had put this message in a safer place like maybe on my bed or on my desk, if I had seen it, I would have called him back and had my first boyfriend. I would be a whole different person by now. I would be confident, I might even have a boyfriend…”
“Most of these things don’t last, Reg.”
“Well, I guess I don’t get to know if mine would have, do I?”
Mom made a visor with her hand in that way she does when you can see her actively regretting her decision to have kids, wondering what it would have been like if she’d had boys. “Reg, you don’t have to be this dramatic. It’s one damn boy and if you knew him so well, I’m sure you would have mentioned him at some point or bumped into him since.”
“Impossible. He moved away.”
“Well, then good. It wasn’t meant to be.”
“You ruined it. This is my Mystic Pizza. I am living in Mystic Pizza, but now it’s too late. My Charlie thinks I hate him.”
Even I knew that Reg went too far with that Mystic Pizza crapola and Mom wasn’t into movies, especially movies like that, but she knew enough to know when one of us was going into what Dad called clunker mode. He always meant that to be funny and it was and it wasn’t and my mouth hurt. My head hurt. The house was too quiet. Too full of women—not me though, I was just a girl—and Mom put on a Carol Brady tone. “Alright, Reg,” she said, like she had all the power. “Let’s get this floor cleaned up.”
But Reg grunted. “Make her help you.”
Her was me and Mom was blunt. “She’s sick. You know that. Come on now.”
It was true. I had strep.
Reg started crying again but these tears were different. Mom went to her. She squatted on the ground like someone in church about to pray. “Reg,” she said. “All you can do is see this as good news. He called. So that’s good.”
“He’s gone.”
“But he called. So now you know that he liked you. Yes?”
“Yes, but.”
“No but. That’s all that matters. He liked you. Many boys will like you.”
Reg rolled her body onto the sofa, almost into it. Mom stood up. “Regina, no.”
But Reg wouldn’t let us look at her. “It’s too late. I’m too messed up in the head.”
This time, when she started crying, Mom kicked the coffee table. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Regina. It’s not my fault or his fault if you’re this much of a mess over one boy you barely knew one summer several years ago.”
“Two years. Not even two.”
“Well so what? You shut yourself down? You mope and melt over one damn boy? A boy you barely knew? Let me tell you something about men, young lady. Men go after it, okay? Men try to get what they want, if they really, really want it. They don’t call once. If he liked you, if he was worth your tears, one unreturned message wouldn’t have deterred him. So enough, okay? Enough!”
Mom left the room and soon she left the house—I’m going to the grocery store—and I sat down in the big chair by the sofa so Reg would know I was there. The front hallway looked so weird with the giant dresser in the middle, like a brown beached whale bear. I said that to Reg, and she laughed and rolled over so she could see the dresser, too.
Her face looked different, like the car right after a wax job and you know it will only shine like that for a day or so. “Funny,” she said.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Do you wish you never found the message?”
She was staring at the dresser so intently. Maybe that was for my benefit. Maybe she wanted me to think that she was evolving before my eyes. “Mom’s wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“Davey did like me a lot. See, Mom likes jerks. Jocks like Dad. Guys who are pushy and won’t take no for an answer. But Davey was sweet. He didn’t write a poem for me or anything, we never got that far, but he was pure. His feelings for me were so strong that he couldn’t call again, you know?”
She seemed so sure of herself and I was young. I believed every word. “Wow,” I said. “Are you gonna call 411 and find his main house?” She looked at me like I wasn’t making sense, so I tried to be clearer. “I mean his real house, where he lives during the school year and all that.”
Reg laughed like I was younger than I was. She was always a little mean when she was happy. “His summer house is just as ‘real’ as his family’s winter house,” she said, and she didn’t look at me. She was too busy hatching a plan, making things seem better than they were, squinting at the wall like a professor. “No,” she said. “I can’t call him. That’s what makes it a tragedy. Only boys can call girls. Only boys can go after what they want. You call a boy, he knows that you want his attention and he can’t help it. If he liked you before, he likes you a little less now that he knows that you like him.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No,” she said. “But that’s the way it is. And there’s more.”
There was God in my sister. Knowledge. Light. “What?”
“When you know that a boy is obsessed with you…” See that? Now Summer Davey the poet was obsessed with her. “Well,” she said. “Attention from boys is the best drug. You get his attention and suddenly, you don’t need a lot of other stuff, you know? You don’t really need him, only his attention.”
She was on her feet now, headed toward the dresser. I offered to help, and she waved me off and then she wiped down the dusty floor until it was shining like a freshly waxed car. She was Hercules. She moved the dresser back to its spot on her own and she clapped her hands. Proud. I swear she was taller. Leaner. Even prettier.
She was like that for a while. My dad made jokes about this new cocksure Reg and my mom gave her extra money so she could get highlights in her hair, hoop earrings. No boys called the house, but this was the house that Davey had called. She was the one that got away and she never let us forget it.
Six months later, things changed. She stopped wearing earrings. She said one of the holes was infected and she didn’t want to freshen up her highlights. She went back to being the Reg she is now, the Reg she was before. Gloomy. Screws all over her body, tighter than ever. You’d think that me and Mom and Dad would have been upset, but in some weird way it was a relief, like oh right, this is Reg. Housebound. Attached to the phone.
One day after school I asked her what was wrong.
“I miss him,” she said.
“Davey?”
She nodded. “I think I’m dying…” All of Reg’s favorite books were about pretty high school girls dying. All of her favorite movies were the movie versions of those books and that enraged her because the girl in the movie was prettier than the girl in the book, because when Reg read the books of course she became the dying pretty girl.
I asked her why she was dying and she answered without hesitation. “Male attention deficit disorder,” she said.
Copyright © 2022 by John F.D. Taff
Foreword copyright © 2022 by Josh Malerman
Afterword copyright © 2022 by Ramsey Campbell
