The Dark New Ghost Stories

Modern audiences have long inured themselves to fear, trained themselves to shut off their childish nighttime terrors and scoff in the face of deliberate scares. But award winning anthologist Ellen Datlow-called "the genre's sharpest assembler of strange, dark fictions" by William Gibson, author of Neuromancer -was convinced that there was life in the ghost story yet. So she challenged a list of varied and talented contributors to scare the heck out of her. The resultant collection singlehandedly redefines the ghost story, going far beyond the accustomed tropes and gore of horror stories to consider the only realm that still truly scares us: the unknown. The Dark takes a nuanced and disquieting look at the tormented and unquiet dead; the darkness in us, the living; and the sometimes tenuous boundary between the two. Under the covers of The Dark , you will find a gathering of sixteen original, unique ghost stories, deftly penned by authors versed in the argot of the damned, including Ramsey Campbell, Jeffrey Ford, Glen Hirshberg, Tanith Lee, Kelly Link, Sharyn McCrumb, Joyce Carol Oates, Lucius Shepard, and Gahan Wilson. No two stories are alike; all are calculated to make it hard to be alone with the lights out. This is the stuff nightmares are made of.

THE TRENTINO KID JEFFREY FORD WHEN I WAS SIX, my father took me to Fire Island and taught me how to swim. That day he put me on his back and swam out past the buoy. My fingers dug into his shoulders as he dove, and somehow I just knew when to hold my breath. I remember being immersed in the cold, murky darkness and that down there the sound of the ocean seemed to be inside of me, as if I were a shell the water had put to its ear. Later, beneath the striped umbrella, the breeze blowing, we ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, grains of sand sparking off my teeth. Then he explained how to foil the undertow, how to slip like a porpoise beneath giant breakers, how to body surf. We practiced all afternoon. As the sun was going down, we stood in the backwash of the receding tide, and he held my hand in his big callused mitt, like a rock with fingers. Looking out at the horizon where the waves were being born, he summed up the day's lesson by saying, "There are really only two things you need to know about the water. The first is you always have to respect it. The second, you must never panic, but always try to be sure of yourself." Years later, after my father left us, after I barely graduated high school, smoked and drank my way out of my first semester at college, and bought a boat and took to clamming for a living, I still remembered his two rules. Whatever degree of respect for the water I was still wanting, by the time I finished my first year working the Great South Bay, the brine had shrunk it, the sun had charred it, and the wind had blown it away, or so I thought. Granted, the bay was not the ocean, for it was usually more serene, its changes less obviously dramatic. There wasn't the constant crash of waves near the shore, nor the powerful undulation of swells farther out, but the bay did have its perils. Its serenity could lull you, rock you gently in your boat of a sunny day, like a baby in a cradle, and then, with the afternoon wind, a storm could build in minutes, a dark, lowering sky quietly gathering behind your back while you were busy working. When the bay was angry enough, it could make waves to rival the ocean's and they wouldn't always come in a line toward shore but from as many directions as one could conceive. The smooth twenty-minute ride out from the docks to the flats could, in the midst of a storm, become an hour-long struggle back. When you worked alone, as I did, there was more of a danger of being swamped. With only one set of hands, you could not steer into the swells to keep from rolling over and pump the rising bilge at the same time. Even if you weren't shipping that much water and were able to cut into the choppy waves, an old wooden flat-bottom could literally be slapped apart by the repeated impact of the prow dropping off each peak and hitting the water with a thud. At that point in my life, it was the second of my father's two rules that was giving me trouble. In general, and very often in a specific sense, I had no idea what I was doing. School had been a failure, and once I'd let it slip through my grasp, I realized how important it could have been to me moving forward in my life. Now I was stuck and could feel the tide of years subtly beginning to rise around me. The job of clamming was hard work, getting up early, pulling on a rake for eight to ten hours a day. There was thought involved but it didn't require imagination, and if anything, imagination was my strong suit. Being tied to the bay was a lonely life, save for the hour or so at the docks in the late afternoon when I would drink the free beer the buyers supplied and bullshit with the other clammers. It was a remarkable way to mark time, to be busy without accomplishing anything. The wind and sun, the salt water, the hard work, aged a body rapidly, and when I would look