Book Review: The New Black: A Neo-Noir Anthology
The New Black: A Neo-Noir Anthology. Richard Thomas, ed. Dark House Press, May 13, 2014, Paperback and e-book, 344 pages.
Reviewed by Marie Becker.
Like the proverbial little black dress, noir, or “neo-noir,” seems to go with everything. It’s a genre, it’s an aesthetic, and it’s a know-it-when-you-see-it creeping sensation at the back of your neck. The New Black: A Neo-Noir Anthology, a twenty-story anthology edited by Richard Thomas, contains stories from across the genre boundaries, veering from horror and crime to magical realism, science fiction, and the grotesque. This flexible approach may make it hard to boil the book down to a pithy description, but it also allows for a collection of well-written and thought-provoking stories.
For sticklers, “black” or “dark,” might feel a more fitting label than the film-saturated word “noir”; the anthology skews in the direction of horror over hard-boiled, and while a few stories linger over grisly physical details (I wanted the ability to read parts of Matt Bell’s “Dredge” with my inner eye shut tight), the bulk of the horror in this collection is in the unseen shadows or even entirely inside the battered brain. Particularly striking is the number of stories centered on children and childhood. In some cases, the unknown horror is darkly twined with the ordinary unknowns of childhood, in which hunkering down in a possible apocalypse is no more or less confusing to a toddler than dozens of other odd things mommy and daddy do; in others, drawing on the primal terror of parenthood gone irredeemably wrong. Darkness can also be horribly, brutally funny, as in Tara Laskowski’s “The Etiquette of Homicide,” a sort of Emily Post meets Hints from Heloise for the workaday hit man.
As in any anthology, some stories stand out—although the quality is high enough overall that the stand-outs will likely be a matter of taste. I was still thinking of the lyrical, taut descriptions cranking up the tension in Craig Wallwork’s “Dollhouse” long after I finished the book, as well as the lush portrayal of an idyllic boyhood turning hellish in “The Familiars” by Micaela Morrissette. Other readers might prefer the twisted and claustrophobic family dynamics in Roxanne Gay’s “How,” or “Children are the Only Ones that Blush” by Joe Meno (The Boy Detective Fails and Hairstyles of the Damned), or the glimpses of futuristic black market mind-molding in “Christopher Hitchens” by Vanessa Veselka, or the beautifully titled “His Footsteps are Made of Soot” by Nik Korpon.
The collection is set off by a thoughtful introduction by Laird Barron about the many roads of genre and influence leading up to this collection, as well as a detailed introduction by Thomas about the selected authors (although the level of detail makes it a more effective postscript than opening salvo). Additionally, each story features a small and sketchy black-and-white illustration by L.A. Spooner, often with an ominous, deadpan quality I found almost reminiscent of the nightmare-inducing illustrations from my childhood copies of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. As a child, I wouldn’t even let those books stay in my room while I slept. If my copy of The New Black hadn’t been an e-book, it might have shared the same fate—and I mean that in the best possible way.