Palace Corbie #6
$9.95 from Merrimack Books
PO Box 83514
Lincoln, NE 68501-3514
Wayne Edwards, Editor
217 numbered pages (+7 pages of back-of-the-book small press ads)

Personal terror takes many forms for many people. And Palace Corbie's mission is to run the reader through them all (or at least, as many examples as will fit in a volume.) This is one of the most professional compilations currently being published in the small press. A perfect-bound trade paperback with a captivating four-color cover, Palace Corbie is filled with almost 30 pieces of fiction and poetry. I could spend pages running down the stories in this edition, but instead I'll spotlight my favorites:

The best tale in the volume is also its closing short story: Charlee Jacob's "Drunken Devils, Sainted Wives" depicts the sado-masochistic marriage of a devil and an angel, the latter of which keeps suiciding throughout the story to punish the narrating devil for his sins. It doesn't matter really, because the eternal can't die, only torture each other forever for their misguided love.

Gleefully wicked:

James S. Dorr gives the volume a changeup from its often unrelenting stories with SF-black humor horror about android pets and nannies whose natural conflicting programming is to "protect."

Darker twisted humor comes from Andrea J. Horlick who meshes kinky sex and a penchant for body alterations in "Names, A Love Story." It's a believable flash of the b&d mindset with an amusing twist. Men are not always the strongest masters.

Dark fantasy:

Amy Hembree's "Stonework" is another one of the top notch pieces here. In it, parents discover that their strangely gifted child Kalli has populated a mud-sculpted "town" with miniature living creatures that she gave life to. Kalli's fatal flaw, however, is a complete lack of respect for life -- both human and the kind she can magically mold with her hands.

Then there's Anke Kriske's "Seaside Vacation" which puts another twist on the old creepy seaside vacation motif with dashes of pod-people and mermen.

There's a Lovecraftian bit that begins with a standard bar pickup and ends in a surreal basement from hell in Mark McLaughlin's "Notes Concerning The Death and/or Decomposition of Reality." This one wraps up a bit too easy for my taste. Another disappointment for me was from the usually gripping Gemma Files. I found Files' historical horror story "Ring of Fire," which revolves around a shapeshifter and wartime atrocities, to be a dense, plodding read.

In the too-real for comfort vein:

K.K. Ormond outlines a gritty inner tale of a woman's abuse and subjugation in "Beecher Street," and CyberPsycho's A.O.D. editor Jasmine Sailing offers a similar grim inner-life portrait in "So Fragile Is The Psyche," about the splintered mental state of a woman whose fear has driven her to self-immolation.

Just 'Out there':

More experimental diatribe than story, Edward Lee's "Shit-House" is simply a laundry list of the headline news perversions of the world (he offers descriptions of syphilitic pornos, a woman dropped down an elevator shaft to abort her AND her child and other disgusting instances.

There are also stories from Mark Rich, Sue Storm, Michael Hemmingson, Margaret Simon and D.F. Lewis as well as novel excerpts from Sean Doolittle and Yvonne Navarro (Navarro's being the more self-contained and gripping of the two).

Palace Corbie is simply one of the best, most varied small press anthologies of horror and dark fantasy that you can buy. So buy it!

Copyright © 1996 by John Everson. All Rights Reserved.