It was on Goodreads that I first saw The Gathering Dark. Since I’ve been trying to read more short stories, I decided I should give it a go. Subtitled An Anthology of Folk Horror, it sounded like important for a viewer of said folk horror. Anthologies, both fiction and non, are uneven by nature. And something that wasn’t clear at first is that this was a young adult collection. I’ve read YA books before, of course. Some of the most creative fiction of the last couple of decades has been for that demographic. The feature I noticed most here was that the horror was mostly gentile, kind of like the horror in my fiction. I never consider myself a YA author, however. Occasionally my characters are teens or twenty-somethings, but for the most part they participate in the adult world, where something is wrong.
Youth is, of course, a fraught time. We’re exploring relationships and trying to sort out the changes taking place in our bodies and our lives as we leave the larval stage. There’s a kind of natural horror to it. At the same time, “folk horror,” like horror itself, is a slippery term. Some of the stories seem to be based on urban legends, and that is definitely the present-day source of folk horror. When it’s found online it’s often called “creepy pasta.” It can be the basis for horror stories, and I’ve seen a few movies that make use of it. Folk horror tends to favor rural settings (true of all the stories here), and superstition, and isolation. Often it involves pagan religion, but here only one story dwells in that territory.
Overall I found the collection interesting and well written. A number of the stories did evoke the feelings of what it was like to be young and afraid. I do wonder how the anthology came about. There’s no introduction and, I know from my own publishing experience that anthologies are a hard sell to most publishers. I’ve noticed Page Street books before. They recently began accepting horror written for adults. They already have a strong YA list, thus The Gathering Dark. They’re also committed to diversity, and that clearly shows throughout this collection. I think it’s important to read young adult literature now and again. It is, literally, the literature of the future—this is what forms young people’s tastes. This particular book was a national bestseller, and it earned some notice on Goodreads. And that was enough to draw me in.
